George: Severance package...The Yankees are giving me three months full pay for doing nothing.
Jerry: They did it for three years. What's another few months?
George: I'm really going to do something with these three months.
Jerry: Like what?
George: I'm gonna read a book. From beginning to end. In that order.
Jerry: I've always wanted to do that...
George: I'm gonna play frolf.
Jerry: You mean golf?
George: Frolf, Frisbee golf Jerry. Golf with a Frisbee. This is gonna be my time. Time to taste the fruits and let the juices drip down my chin. I proclaim this: The Summer
of George!
“Seinfeld” - May 15, 1997: “The Summer of George”
For the most part, I don't get too sentimental over any single period of my life. After all, if we're honest with ourselves, there's always a healthy heaping of crap to go along with the good times. Or as Billy Joel sang, “The good old days weren't always so good and tomorrow isn't as bad as it seems.”
But every once in a while, generally in our youth, there's a time when we're actually hitting on all cylinders. Each day was a new adventure. There's one perfect time – generally between May and September – that you will admit, “Yeah, I'd like to do that one more time.” And I can honestly say, without too much hyperbole, that I can proclaim 1987 as “The Summer of Mike.”
I had just completed my first year at Eastern Washington University and had already slashed through a good hunk of my GURs (that's general university requirements, natch). I was 19 years old, getting good grades, had a devoted and pretty girlfriend (sadly, time would prove I wouldn't be all that devoted to her) and was a lean 5-foot-11, 155 pounds.
I had a decent full-time job at The Pop Shoppe, which was probably the last manufacturer of soda in returnable bottles. My uncle worked there, but he rather infamously quit not long after I started for my second (and last) summer.
The work in of itself was pretty mindless: load the washer (great for forearm strength, but sucked when you had to pull broken glass out from inside the machine with your bare hands), inspect the bottles (think of the opening of “Laverne and Shirley”) and load cases onto pallets (my least-favorite duty, as this required mucho strength and speed). But I was in the best shape of my life.
One of the perks of working for a pop manufacturer (aside from all the soda you could drink for free) was that the job started at 7 a.m. and was over at 3 p.m. I'd go home, lie in the sun for an hour and borrow the folks' car for an evening out with my friends or two-summer Janice. (She was named this unflattering moniker because that's how long we lasted. Yeah, I know, I'm a jerk.)
The other benefit of the job was that there were constant machinery breakdowns or supply problems. You wouldn't believe how many times we would run out of sugar (which, obviously, is a pretty important component of pop) or CO2 (the other major ingredient). So that only meant one thing: head out to the lake.
My grandparents' cabin on Lake Coeur d'Alene has changed relatively little in 30 years. While I enjoy the calm serenity of the deck now, back then I was on the dock or in the boat pretty much all the time. Gas was relatively cheap, and there was no reason not to water ski all day and then explore Arrowpoint, Carlin Bay or downtown Coeur d'Alene all night. This was accomplished not because of a fake I.D., but because I was grandfathered in under Idaho's old drinking age of 19 before the switch to 21.
To say I took advantage of this legal loophole not afforded to me in my home state of Washington would be a colossal understatement.
Then there was the music: T'Pau's “Heart and Soul” on FM radio at midnight. The back-breaking bass line from Lisa Lisa's “Head to Toe.” The video for Sammy Hagar's “Winner Takes It All,” where he famously arm-wrestles Sylvester Stallone. Aeromsith's Top-40 re-emergence with “Dude Looks Like a Lady.” And you could not go anywhere without hearing U2's “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.”
Generally, I'd say smart advice is always to live in the present. But I'd go back to visit the Summer of Mike in a hot second.
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