If This Were a Summer Day in the 1960's...

I would have gotten up and had breakfast with my mom and dad. Oatmeal or Wheaties. A tea kettle would whistle when the water was ready for coffee. My mom would float back and forth between sink, stove, counter and table providing whatever was needed.

I can see her now packing dad's lunch, a lunch consisting of very thinly sliced dried beef on white bread. She wrapped it in waxed paper. In the back ground, WOOD AM radio is playing. We all fall into a hush when the weather report is given.

My mom's plan for the day - every day - always was to get her work done early, so she could relax. Relaxing to her was to take a lawn chair and a magazine out into the backyard.

I had a pool out back. It was long and shallow and green, with triangular red metal seats on each corner. I'm sure I still have burn marks from sitting on those seats in the hot sun.

Inevitably, one of the three neighborhood Pam's would be available to play with. If they weren't named Pam, they were Debbie or Cindy. The pool of names to draw from wasn't as deep in the 60's as it is now.

My mom had this wonderful idea from time to time. She would say "Let's have lunch on the back steps!" I still remember the day I did the same thing with my kids. It wasn't about them. She could just as well have said what I did - "I just scrubbed this floor and you, my dearly loved little mess makers, are eating your lunch outside today!" My mom had more tact.

I could play outside all day. Roaming from one Pam's house to another, and another. But, at 4:25 I would hear the 'work whistle' blow. We didn't live close at all to my dad's job, but we could hear the whistle. I knew what that meant. Come home and get ready for supper.

In my family, we ate at precisely the same time every single week day. We ate well balanced meals. Nothing was allowed to interrupt them. Not the telephone, nor a neghborhood friend 'calling' my name at the back door. Oh, how fun would it be to have someone 'call' me that way again. Lean into the screen on the old back porch and in a sing-songy way call "Juuuu-oooo-Deeeeee!"

We ate things like tuna noodle casserole, corned beef casserole, hamburgers, fried spam, salmon patties, always with either rice or potatoes. Always, a vegetable. I have a memory of sitting in front of a bowl of canned plums while my mom insisted that I eat them. I remember she called it 'dessert'. To this day, you could not pay me to eat a canned plum. In some sense, I am STILL sitting in front of that bowl. Bleeeck!

On a hot evening, my dad would take the newspaper out to the front porch and read it until a Tiger game came on the radio. Some nights you could hear the game, as if in stereo, on several of the other seven houses that made up our short little street. Sometimes, Cindy's brother Mike played his harmonica on their front porch. He was GOOD. And, older and extremely cute.

Occasionally, on really hot summer nights, the whole family would pile into the car, in our pajamas, no less. Actually, I was probably the only one of us in pajamas. I remember they were blue - and I didn't know it at the time, but they looked like scrubs. Most likely, this is when my love of Blue Moon ice cream developed. My mom is very practical, and would like the eventual stains to at least somewhat match the fabric.

Alone in the dark, I would listen to the night-time sounds. Soft voices on porches. Mike's harmonica. Ernie Harwell announcing the Tiger game. A car back-firing. The occasional fire cracker. My dad and mom laughing along with the monologue on the Tonight Show.

And then I'd wake up, and do it all over again.