Raise Hell Over Summer

I realized something completely disturbing the other day while I was driving home from work. For whatever reason (read: due to my obsession with celebrity gossip and chronic procrastination during the day), I worked late at the firm and it was past midnight before I drove home. I was driving from Buckhead back to Midtown with the windows rolled down when I realized that even though I didn’t have the A.C. blaring at Artic temperatures, I wasn’t sweating like a fat kid at camp. The outside air was downright pleasant – a small miracle in Atlanta. And it hit me; summer is almost over. I half expected a single yellow leaf to drop from one of the trees and float into my car – Mother Nature’s little messenger.

No, I’m not getting all sentimental about the end of summer. I’ve always been a girl that digs fall. I think it is partly because my Grandma used to do color consultations and she insisted I was an autumn despite my affinity for hot pink. I didn’t really get the whole color consultation thing at age 7 and thought it meant I looked good during autumn months rather than in autumnal colors. Plus, I’ve always been a nerd and looked forward to going back to school when I was young. (As an only child, my favorite game to play with my stuffed animals was school – of course I was the teacher. Oh, and once my grandpa gave me one of his old brief cases and you would have thought he gave me a Barbie hot wheel. I also had a poster of Sandra Day O’Connor in my room; I was an odd kid.) Anyway, I loved fall because it meant it was time to buy new school supplies. I think I fainted in Wal-Mart the day I discovered that Lisa Frank designed her own line of trapper keepers.

My realization that summer is almost over is disturbing because I hardly realized it was here. I am so old and boring; summer came and went quicker than a box of chocolates in a sorority house. How did this happen? Except for attending a bbq or two and leaving the firm early on Fridays because all the partners were out of the office and having “family time,” I hardly commemorated summer at all. I don’t think I even had a cob of corn all season. (I plan to rectify the corn horror this week). Sure, I made Bijou wear her pink summer collar with the green palm trees embroidered on it, and I went tubing down the ‘Hooch with a bag of Franzia (for you non-Georgians, “Hooch” is short for Chattahoochee, as in the river whose muddy water holds a special place in Alan Jackson’s heart), but I certainly didn’t celebrate summer like I used to.

Back in the day, before the purple ink saying “Raise Hell Over Summer” (RHOS when our hands got tired) could dry in our yearbooks, my friends and I were driving to the lake and trying to get the clerk at Seven-Eleven to sell us Bud Light and Boone’s Farm. Sometimes we’d get lucky and the clerk would hand over some libations, but usually we’d end up raiding our parents’ liquor cabinet. At my house, where the bottles were marked with a sharpie for this very reason, we could only drink clear liquors because they didn’t turn a funky color when you filled them back up with water. But it was ok because you know what’s clear? Vodka. I tended to be the mixologist of the group since I had been making and leaving “Santa” a bourbon and coke on Christmas Eve every year since I was six. From what I recall, bourbon and peach schnapps aren’t bad when mixed with iced tea, although, our booze palates probably were not very discernible back then (I mean we also drank Bartles & James and Zima).

Summer days were spent at the pool, the lake and each others’ houses. My friend Megan and I made just about every type of milkshake imaginable in the old lime green blender her parents received as a wedding present (until I left a metal spoon down in the bottom causing it to blow up all over the kitchen), and we drove hundreds of miles on country roads smoking Marlboro Ultra Lights with the windows down blaring Indigo Girls (even though the boys made fun of us and called it “lesbo music”).

When we were old enough to have summer jobs, we waited tables and worked as camp counselors but once we clocked out, there was always a party somewhere – at the boat dock, the house of the kid whose parents were out of town (including my own), or the cul-de-sac of the new neighborhood no on lived in yet (hey, I wasn't born a city girl). I’m still amazed at the ability of sixteen year old boys to collect kegs and whisky like baseball cards.

I’m not sure when it changed. No doubt my college summers were great to; I traveled Europe, interned in D.C. and lived at the beach with my best friend. But even those summers didn’t have the carefree innocence of those early country summers when the season seemed never ending. My summers since college certainly became more serious and short. Through law school I worked for the Government and law firms, and then studied for the bar (the latter being the worst summer in history causing me to seriously contemplate moving to the Bahamas and making banana leaf hats for a living).

Now summer seems to be a season that only kids enjoy and well, maybe people with kids (if you call taking 3 toddlers to the beach with 14 bags, an umbrella, 3 coolers, 7 floats, water wings, and a boogie board, enjoyment). The only reason that I, a single working adult, even know that it’s summer is because it’s so hot my knees sweat and sometimes my waitress isn’t old enough to serve me booze.

I just started to get tan and into a summer swing when I got stuck behind a school bus. And tonight, it took me twice as long to run into the Publix down the street to buy Smart Water and Cinnamon Toast Crunch (breakfast and dinner of champions) because I share it with all of Georgia Tech’s returning population (but it was entertaining to see frat guys realizing that dude, steak is way more expensive than hot dogs). Summer came and disappeared like a fart in the wind.

I think this is a dang shame. So tonight, just for the fun of it, I bought some peach ice cream and enjoyed a cup (ok, a bowl) on my balcony. I even blared a little Indigo Girls while mentally daring my neighbors to complain. And even though the ice cream was no Oreo-chocolate-peanut butter-banana milkshake, I started to sing loud enough for the people on the sidewalk to hear, and for just a minute, I felt like I was raising hell over summer.