Final Stretch, 7 & 8. Summer Dreaming.

It's June and summer is here. Between last month, this month, and at least the first half of next month, is the best time of year. We are enjoying the high point of the year; it's light at six in the morning, twilight stretches to past eleven in the evening, and the weather is beautifully warm.

Another sign of summer were the four buses that passed by me as I went to take out the trash this morning, taking various groups of kids on their field trips. Exams are over, and now it's time for the end of year field trips. This year, they're back, to the kids' joy. They are the true hallmark of summer vacation, the foretaste of a summer of play and fun for many.

My memory of primary school tells me that we did have field trips that were fun. I remember one to an amusement park, another to a bowling alley, one to watch Pippi Longstocking at a small theatre somewhere in the Back Bay. There was one during the school year to local businesses, to see how they were run. I also remember one, during my Catholic school years, to a public primary school for a shared work in handicrafts (It was around Thanksgiving and lasted at least two days. I remember it most because the first day I thought I had to wear my uniform, and did so, while everyone else wore street clothes.). But I don't remember many others, though I know they must have existed. There weren't any in high school, that I remember. The approach of summer there was marked by high temperatures that made sitting in a classroom torture, most years. 

High schoolers here also have field trips. One year, they had a long one lasting about five days, in which they walked part of the Way of Santiago. They, and the primary schoolers, have gone to the Cíes Islands, out in the Bay of Vigo. My daughter and her class once went to the water park at Cerceda, near A Coruña. Then there are the trips at the end of the obligatory schooling. Some schools have gone to Catalan towns along the Mediterranean. I think this year's fourth years have a trip planned to Rome. Others have gone to Mérida. Then there are the trips to London for the third years, to hone their English (they prefer to use sign language, though, and find the local Spaniard working in the spots they go to.), or the trips to Paris for those who continue their French studies beyond the second year of high school. The language trips, though, happen in spring, so they get to miss a week of school. 

June field trips are the prelude to summer fun. I remember how lovely those days were. Nothing to do except what my mother told me to do. Just get up at any time, play at anything, not worry about homework or tests. I would spend my days between the dining room, kitchen, and back porch. We had a yard, but it was mostly filled with weeds and utterly devoid of interest. So, I would play on the shady back porch with the two large maple trees facing it from a slope in the yard, held back by a stone wall. The street level behind us was higher than our own, so the yard had two levels. One summer, a family moved into the house behind ours and they had children my age. They would invite me over, and I would climb up the slope, squeeze through an opening in the fence, and play with them in their one-level yard. 

I remember also visiting a classmate's house on a nearby street. Her name was Yvonne, and her family was Polish and very polite. I remember her speaking Polish to her mother, once. Then, in seventh grade, I made friends with a girl who lived a few streets down from mine. We would visit each other's houses, both in winter and summer. Then, she left Boston Latin School, and we went our separate ways. 

I remember the music sparkling through the still summer afternoons from the ice cream truck that patrolled the back streets. It rarely stopped in my street because it was a busy thoroughfare. Even if it had, my mother wouldn't have let me buy from the truck, because, as she argued, we had perfectly fine ice cream in our freezer, and money doesn't grow on trees. She would let me buy soft serve ice cream from the ice cream trucks at the beach near Castle Island, however. We would spend our Sunday afternoons there, under the trees of the grassy park across the street from the beach. Before we had a car, we would go by train and bus to South Boston, towels, tablecloths, and food packed into sturdy paper shopping bags from Stop & Shop. Later, when we moved out of the North End, we would pack all our picnic provisions into our grey Toyota Corolla, and drive out there. I still remember driving through South Boston, topping hills, stopping at stop lights. When I saw my first glimpse of the blue sea in the distance, at the end of the street, I knew we were approaching the end of the drive.  

The summers we came here on vacation were the headiest ones. In the earliest years, we would visit Lima Travel Agency in Boston's North End. Lima was a large Portuguese man with glasses and slicked back hair, whose first name I never knew. The waiting room was hung with colorful travel posters, while in his windowless inner sanctum I remember most the maps hanging on the wall. I would stare at them while my parents debated boring things about dates and flights and fares. We would leave with a date to return the following week to pick up the tickets and pay the fares in cash. Those were the days long before do-it-yourself flight puchases on the internet and the ubiquity of credit cards.

I remember my mother started packing weeks before our departure date, putting things in suitcases she wanted to bring and leave here. (Yes, we still have a packaged, flat, no-iron sheet she bought at Woolworth's one year. I don't know whether to put it into use or leave it as it is for nostalgia's sake!) I loved the plane trip, despite the turbulance we would have at times, and the lack of sleep. It meant a summer of playing with my cousins and neighbors, and going to festas, and remembering half-forgotten paths through the cornfields, and marvelling at the warmer ocean temperatures. Then, the anticlimax of the plane trip back, arriving in Boston to a noisy, smelly, moving city in the warm, cloying evening, filled with exhaust fumes, and the smell of warm concrete. My parents would sometimes go back to work the next day; I would go to school within days, too, and the glorious, burning summer was over.

Life continues.

With my parents when I was 4 or 5, at the beach at Castle Island.