The Ghosts of Summers Past
In the very early stages of another summer, I'm once again becoming nostalgic for summers past and hearkening back to the good old days and the not-always-so-good old days. I thought it would be a fun exercise to briefly profile and rate every summer on memory and ultimately rank them accordingly....
1983--The first summer for which I have a fair amount of memories. I was five years old for most of the summer (turned 6 in late August) and spent days at the Albert Lea Child Care Center where I hung out with my good buddy Josh. It was clear to everyone I was an eccentric oddball child as I developed obsessive fascinations with the most mundane things, particularly whatever gimmicks the fast-food chains were pushing. This summer, it happened to be Burger King's "Return of the Jedi" glasses and Hardee's "Smurfs" glasses. I spent summer evenings at home watching reruns of "The Fall Guy", "The A-Team", and "T.J. Hooker" with the level of spirit which I watched them during their original airings. Beyond that, I have random memories of afternoon activities in Albert Lea with my mom....back when Albert Lea could be loosely described as a cool town in sharp contrast to today. Late in the summer, we took a family trip to the Black Hills and Devil's Tower which I still remember fondly.
Grade: A-
1984--At six years old and still an oddball child, I took on weird new fascinations with memorizing the TV grid, memorizing the layout of the calendar, memorizing geography statistics and all the Presidents in order, and collecting every box of Crayola crayons the company made (8, 16, 24, 48, and 64). The coloring fascination developed along with my cousin Jamie, who was essentially like a sister to me in my boyhood and who I usually saw at least once a week. Another cousin from northern Minnesota visited with his family and I kept close company with him for a week, developing a bond that would last till our teenage years. I stayed at two different babysitters' places in Hartland while my parents were at work, settling midsummer with Marvyl Kopperud. We took a family vacation to the Ozarks that I still recall vividly, especially since it was the last bona fide family vacation we ever took. Allowed to stay up later in the evenings during summer, I would watch reruns of shows like "Hart to Hart", "Matt Houston", and "Remington Steele" that were on too late for me to watch during the school year. Perhaps as a consequence of the storylines from some of these shows, along with escalating news stories and fear-mongering by my parents, I developed a paranoid fear of being kidnapped that summer. Overall, another good summer but I preferred the year before.
Grade: B+
1985--I was seven years old going on eight in the summer of 1985, which can most accurately be referred to as the baseball and baseball card summer. I had gotten into baseball cards early that year when I had the chicken pox and, much like just about everything else I got into in those days, I became obsessed with it. Staying at Kopperud's place while my parents were at work, I would spend endless hours with their older son comparing cards from various years. I also rarely missed a Game of the Week broadcast that summer and kept close tabs on the then-hapless Minnesota Twins that year, which happened to be the year the Metrodome hosted the All-Star Game. When I wasn't comparing baseball cards while staying at Kopperuds, I'd be watching ABC soap operas and listening to AM radio much of the day. Another visit from my cousin in northern Minnesota livened things up as did my trip with cousin Jamie to Adventureland in Des Moines. The other very exciting development in the summer of 1985 was the promos for a new adventure show coming that fall that absolutely fascinated me. It was called "MacGyver", and I fell in love with the show after seeing the first of its many advertisements. The show would escalate my already intense obsession with TV to an entirely different level in a few short months. While still a decent summer, I have fewer lasting memories from 1985 than the two summers previous.
Grade: B
1986--Another summer generally on par with the summer before it. I was firmly entrenched in late afternoon tae kwon do classes by now and attended a "karate camp" in Mason City where my horsing around swinging from ceiling pipes resulted in me badly bruising my elbow and being taken to the emergency room. My increased awareness of drugs, particularly cocaine, amidst the country's most strident Miami Vice-esque anti-drug climate, formed a hard-core paranoia in me about drug dealers and users that peaked in the summer of 1986. Watching reruns of "MacGyver" was just as fun as watching them the first time around and my days spent at the Kopperuds in Hartland along with visits from all my favorite cousins allowed me to check off all the necessary boxes of must-do summer events. I also added one new summer event to the checklist with my first highly memorable visit to the Minnesota State Fair, which began an annual tradition that has held up for the last 23 years.
Grade: B
1987--I was nine years old by now and generally the same eccentric weirdo I had always been, except now I had a girl on my mind as an elementary crush seemed to be heading in the right direction at the end of third grade, so much so that 1987 was the only summer where I actually looked forward to the return of the school year. Other major events of the summer of 1987 included a drive to Nebraska to visit relatives as well as a visit to an amusement park and a Royals baseball game in Kansas City, and a visit up to northern Minnesota to see my cousin and his family. I was still in tae kwon do classes and still spending days at Kopperuds, where I remember making the two-block pilgrimage every Tuesday morning to the old Sibilrud's grocery store in Hartland to read the brand-new, hot-off-the-presses TV Guide from cover to cover, with the owner/manager having no problem at all letting me stand in the front of the store reading his magazine at no charge and then leaving without buying a single thing. The fact that I had something, or rather someone, to look forward to when I went back to school made the summer all the more likeable.
Grade: B+
1988--This was the summer of the drought, with southern Minnesota temperatures rising above 100 degrees more times in one three-month period than they most likely have in the 20 years since. As a 10-year-old hot lover weather with few responsibilities, I was digging it. This was also the summer of Nickelodeon and swimming lessons in Albert Lea, which were intertwined as I stayed at my grandparents' place in AL for two weeks to take my swimming lessons and obsessively gobbled up as many hours of Nickelodeon's daytime lineup as was possible in the hours when I wasn't swimming. My cousin from northern Minnesota visited twice that summer and stayed at my grandparents' place, enabling me further opportunities to waste countless hours watching the Nickelodeon schedule. During the daytime hours spent at Kopperuds the rest of the summer weeks, I found myself increasingly fascinated with the soap "One Life to Live". My attendance at the AL pool (and my bravery in going off diving boards and the like) escalated after taking my swimming lessons, which I also juggled with my final summer of tae kwon do classes. Wrapping up the summer was a group visit to the Minnesota State Fair with both of my favorite cousins. Overall, my most memorable summer up to that point.
Grade: A-
1989--At 11 years old, this is the last of what I consider my "boyhood summers", but it was a good one as I finnagled two visits to northern Minnesota with my grandparents to see my cousin up there, one of which we travelled up to Winnipeg, Canada. My cousin would come down in August for the Freeborn County Fair, and we went every day to squander every dime we had on junk food, midway rides, mini-golf and BINGO! It was the last summer I would spend at Kopperuds place in Hartland, but things livened up there when they got hooked up with cable midsummer and I got to watch morning reruns of "The Fall Guy" and "T.J. Hooker" every day. Keeping on the TV theme (lifelong obsession), I was fully in tune with "MacGyver" during the summer rerun period of the series' best season. Another obsession was born by summer's end when my uncle purchased a Nintendo system that was readily available at my grandma's every time I visited. I had dabbled with Nintendo here and there prior to that, but this was my first steady diet and it inspired much more extensive interest in the months ahead. I had just finished the first school year where I felt good about my performance and had lofty dreams of continuing that roll as I proceeded into sixth grade, but my momentum seemed to hit a brick wall and I fell into my old habits of mischievous behavior and lack of sufficient interest in my studies. Nonetheless, another great summer just narrowly less impressive and memorable than the summer before it.
Grade: A-
1990--Without a doubt, the best and most transformative summer of my life. My dad had gotten laid off along with everyone else at the Farmstead meatpacking plant in Albert Lea, so he was looking for work. That meant no more spending days at the Kopperuds and instead full-time lounging at the folks' rural acreage. I exploited this newfound freedom by staying up every evening till all the area stations signed off, watching "Night Court" and "Entertainment Tonight", among other things. "Entertainment Tonight" presented an intriguing metaphor as I found myself developing a crush on weekend anchor Leeza Gibbons. She was my first "adult celebrity" crush at the precipice of my threshold-crossing into the time when boys start having different kinds of feelings about the opposite sex. By summer's end, when I turned 13, I was well on my way to being a typical horny teenager at the perfect time as I was about to go into 7th grade in a different town with some different classmates, including a new batch of girls whose cusp-of-womanhood assets would really accelerate my hormones to raging levels. Other highlights of the summer of 1990 were the crossing of two passions. My TV obsession would begin to wane following the summer of 1990 but my newfound passion for road trips, still with me today, was officially born. It started when I went with my mom to my cousin's in northern Minnesota, and from there up to Winnipeg, Canada. Rather than dreading the eight-hour drive each way, I found myself loving it that year. The following month would further ignite my travelling passion as I tagged along with my dad every day as he did vinyl repair work in car lots throughout southern Minnesota. The monthlong experience influenced me in countless ways despite the overall unlikelihood that my dad and I would ever be able to get along in such close quarters for such an extended period of time. Beyond all of that, there were two visits from my cousin up north, one that included a trip to Valleyfair and the second during Freeborn County Fair week. In no other summer do I remember virtually every week's events as vividly as I do this summer. It was the perfect summer at the perfect time in my life.
Grade: A+
1991--Lingering memories of the previous summer created a sense of nostalgia this year when I was 13 going on 14. I knew I'd never be able to recreate the magic of the year before but my shtick is to always try to. A thorn in my side this summer was an extreme self-consciousness that frequently bordered on depression, largely the product of a hormonal early teen boy who couldn't seem to get the kind of positive attention he was hoping for from the girls he lusted for. It was largely the usual issues of teen angst, but it hit its peak this summer as I attempted to isolate myself as often as possible. The positive developments of the summer of 1991 included my first annual MacGyver Marathon (only a partial at that time that included the 44 episodes I had on tape up to that point), the Cinderella story that was the 1991 Minnesota Twins that started to take form early that summer, our family visit to the Noah's Ark water park in Wisconsin Dells, and the first annual safari to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a long-standing tradition that is largely a nostalgic nod to the days I travelled the car lots of southern Minnesota with my dad. My dad had a seasonal job over the fall, winter, and spring for a few years so he was home with me most summer days, which was largely a double-edged sword. It was the first summer I did some paid yard work for family friends in Hartland and the last hurrah for my baseball card collecting as I enjoyed a brief spurt of renewed interest in the pastime before giving it up for good. A far cry from the summer prior, but nonetheless a place in time I generally remember fondly.
Grade: B+
1992--This was the summer of classic MacGyver and the Minnesota Twins. After the prior season's surprise World Series win, I was fully engaged in what appeared to be another great season for my team, and as a consequence listened to almost every Twins game broadcast on radio. The Twins had a number of locally available TV broadcasts that summer as well, allowing me the chance to watch a game or two every week. The Twins fizzled in August that year, but it was a fun ride up to that point. "MacGyver" wrapped up its run in May 1992, which renewed my interest in getting the old episodes recorded. My grandma was the only one I knew with cable access, so my summer mission was to piecemeal as many early episodes as possible and add them to my collection. Every opportunity that arose, I would tag along with my mom to town and tape a cable repeat of an old MacGyver episode, many of which I hadn't seen in 5-7 years. Beyond the Twins and MacGyver reruns, 1992 wasn't one of my most memorable summers. I spent alot of time learning new census figures and obsessing about travelling Minnesota, even though I didn't get to explore much new terrain that summer. I had a passing interest in the emerging 1992 Presidential election, but by summer there was a long lull in the action except for the two conventions, both of which depressed me as I watched the Democratic party move to the center (not where I was) at the beginning of the Clinton years. Visits from my cousin became fewer and summer ended with his single visit during a pretty bleak stretch of days weatherwise that chilled our plans. I was 14 going on 15 this summer, high school-bound in the fall and finding myself nervous about rising performance expectations as a college-bound student. That made the summer of 1992 one of the harder ones to let go of.
Grade: B
1993--This was one of my weakest summers. It was memorable, but not necessarily for the right reasons. I attended drivers education classes in New Richland for three weeks in June and took to the streets and highways for the first time, disastrously, in August, and I proved to be slower to become comfortable with the wheel than most. My dad had just been laid off from his seasonal chemical plant job as the place shut down its Albert Lea operations, so he was now in my face every day and becoming increasingly annoying to me as we worked to put siding up on the farm buildings. Of course, 1993 was the flooding year, and I remember the cool, dreary weather that never seemed to clear up, with skies opening up early and often, even to the point where we had to clean up a little water in our basement for the first time ever. Still, it was nothing compared to the footage I watched on the news nearly every night of widespread flooding devastation in Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois. I started the summer as I had the previous listening to every Twins game on the radio, but when they were below .500 by the All Star Break and seemingly going nowhere, I gave up on them and found other ways to occupy my evenings. And as a consequence of overdosing on red Jell-O at some point in July, I would break out in hives for the next few months every time my body temperature rose, making any physical activity or public situation a nightmare for me. My fondest memories of the summer of 1993 involved my nightly TV ritual which included my first complete MacGyver Marathon (by now I had all the cable reruns recorded) along with late-night reruns of "Night Court" and "Growing Pains" that held up well. The summer nonetheless ended with a thud as a family trip up to my cousin's in northern Minnesota turned into an unmitigated disaster...so bad in fact I outlined the trip in a sophomore year speech in English class that illicited numerous laughs for its "vacation from hell" bona fides. Easily the weakest summer up to this point.
Grade: C+
1994--The comparatively bleak prior summer gave way to one of my favorite summers in 1994. The summer started with a sort of cousin reunion as I attended my favorite cousin's graduation in northern Minnesota in the company of Jamie, the younger cousin from back home who I was closest with. Amazingly, all three of us still seemed to click with the level of friendship we always had. My grandpa narrowly escaped death but the close call led festering family tensions to come to a boil on my dad's side and unfolded entertainingly as the summer transpired. For his part, my dad was stuck doing a bunch of crappy, short-term jobs to pay the bills, which at the very least enabled me to have my first summer spent mostly to myself at the farm, where I would get into all kinds of mischief including digging through closets for long-lost toys and papers as well as fashioning makeshift bombs out of household materials. I revisited my 80s TV obsession for the first time with any level of intensity early in the summer of 1994, and really got in the spirit when I was able to occasionally watch middle-of-the-night reruns of "The Fall Guy" and "The A-Team" on a syndicated Twin Cities station when the air conditions were just right to get it in. This nostalgia trip was at least partly responsible for my own creative renaissance as I began cranking out my "Alex Burrows" adventure scripts with regularity. But perhaps the most defining aspect of the summer of 1994 was that it was my summer of country music. I had dabbled in the genre throughout the 80s and early 90s, but found myself increasingly fascinated at some point in my sophomore year of high school, ultimately leading to my usual obsessive-compulsive fixation. It's easy to see why looking back as 1994 was easily the most progressive and outside-the-box year in country music's history. My fascination ultimately led me to track the chart movement of country songs every Saturday when the top-40 Countdown aired. This all culminated with a birthday gift of a CD player for my 17th birthday in late August and my attending the Faith Hill concert at the Freeborn County Fair. For whatever reason, I became comfortable in my own skin that summer in a way I hadn't been in several years prior, my teen angst issues being past their peak. This all made for my best summer of my high school years.
Grade: A
1995--Easily the blandest summer of my entire life. One would think the summer before my senior year of high school would be full of great memories, but I can only remember a handful of things after the month of June. In June, I was present when escalating tensions on the Hagen side of the family came to a head one tense Saturday night and made permanent a rift in the family that had begun to emerge the summer prior. I also finally took my driver's exam and passed on the second try, and helped my dad paint the house before June came to a close. After that, he got called back to work on the railroad (where he finally got his big break after five years of trying to find his footing) and I was home alone every day, where I should have been working at a summer job but had no car to get to one. The previous summer I was still in a carefree state of mind, but by the summer of 1995 the fast-approaching high school graduation was starting to become real to me. As someone who has never handled change very well, that kind of cramped my style. The only specific memories I have of the second half of the summer of '95 was a continued obsession with tracking the country music charts even though the quality of the music was beginning to decline compared to that of the previous summer. While I don't necessarily have a trove of negative memories from this summer, the lack of any memories at all underscores just how mundane it was. Yet I distinctly remember that it seemed like the summer nonetheless flew by despite its mediocrity.
Grade: C
1996--The previous summer may have been my blandest of all-time, but the summer of 1996 was hands-down the worst. I was in an emotional funk out of the starting gate following high school graduation and setting foot out into the real world (or so I told myself at least). I went on a brief wild goose chase to my aunt's place up in the Cities when she thought she could get me in at the factory where she worked in Plymouth. The prospect of driving in the Cities seemed poised to become very real very fast for me until I got a better job offer back home (again...or so I thought) before I even started in the Cities. I ended up toiling 12-hour days in an Owatonna canning factory for a few weeks before I got fired and replaced with the boss' nephew/neighbor/godson. Beginning in mid-July, I was done working for the summer (except for a few odd jobs for relatives and neighbors) and left with nothing to do but wallow in angst over the coming freshman year of college, which I desperately dreaded. Making matters worse, much of my downtime was spent reading a dreadfully insipid book that was our pre-homework project for beginning school. For one final summer, I tracked the country music charts even though the music was fast becoming trite and bland, and where most of the songs I liked seem to flop. Later in the summer, I became more engaged in the Presidential race, even though it was largely a foregone conclusion that Clinton would beat Dole and secure a second term effortlessly. Even though I wasn't in a mood to enjoy it, the summer ended memorably with an encounter at the Minnesota State Fair that would set the stage for my preferences in females for years to come and with my first visit to the Mall of America. Never at any point in my past was I as down on life as I was in 1996, so I would have had to have stumbled into all kinds of good fortune to felt a reversal in my attitude. Needless to say, it didn't happen that summer.
Grade: F
1997--After a solid year of making myself miserable about college, I began the summer of 1997 having a intangible feeling that times were about to get better....and was I ever right. The sweet relief of walking away from campus after that miserable freshman year was priceless in itself, but the ability to reconnect with my Freeborn County comfort zone was desperately needed and lived up to expectations completely. I started a new summer job, which in the past would have been a source of trepidation for me, but I guess I could just feel going in that I was cruising into a slacker gig when I got hired at the rural electric co-op in Albert Lea with a cushy 7-3:30 schedule. The deal became even sweeter when I discovered that the other summer employee was none other than high school neighbor buddy Jason Hoerler, with whom I toiled in three months worth of mindless and laid-back busywork. I couldn't have asked for a better arrangement, and the abundance of leisure time enabled me to afford plenty of renewed focus on long-standing obsessions like summer road trips and 80s TV, the latter of which was being rerun on the FX cable available at my grandma's place where I spent ample time videotaping shows like "The Fall Guy", "A-Team", and "Miami Vice" for future viewing. Since I only had one channel on TV at college, I was also able to catch up on contemporary favorites like "High Incident" and "Viper" during summer reruns. As summer neared its end, I found myself slumbering back into my melancholy "back to school" mode of the summer before, although not quite as bad. Even so, 1997 was my best summer since 1990 during that decade and a desperately needed retreat from where I had been.
Grade: A
1998--My second year of college wasn't as horrible as my first, meaning my euphoria at returning home for the summer wasn't at the level it was the prior summer. An opening for a casual carrier at the Albert Lea Post Office surfaced and I took it, which was a source of some trepidation heading into my training period. The first month of the new summer was challenging as the postal carrying job proved tougher than I had originally expected and also more consuming as I worked six days a week. But by the 4th of July or so, I had settled into a groove at the job and began to like it. Furthermore, I found myself inexplicably falling for my casual carrier coworker and realizing in time the feeling was at least partially mutual. No sooner did our courtship begin before it was forced to end, with unfulfilled assurances to reconnect the following summer. The postal job essentially represented every memorable aspect of my summer in 1998, but nonetheless afforded me countless opportunities to grow and insights about myself that continued to percolate into my junior year of college. By summer's end, I had turned 21 and had for all intents and purposes just had my first real job.
Grade: B+
1999--No summer in my past (or hopefully in my future) has ever gotten off to as disastrous of a start as the summer of 1999 did. Within 10 minutes after arriving home from my junior year of college for the summer, I discovered that the postal job I was planning to return to was no longer available and that the hot chick postal coworker I was planning to resume my would-be romance with did not return home for the summer. The gut punch kept me off balance for quite awhile, but I was fortunate enough to get my old summer job at Freeborn-Mower Electric in Albert Lea back. I remained down those first few weeks of summer, but eventually came to appreciate things had turned out about as good as could be expected given the hand I was dealt. While I didn't feel the same "perfect summer job" vibe this year that I had when I worked at the co-op two summers prior, I found myself digging the cushy workload and accommodating schedule as the months pushed forward. I never really felt the impending unease about the approaching end of college the way I did the approaching end of high school at that point in 1995, but still found myself nervous at times about what laid ahead. For the most part though, I just cruised through another summer at home, disappointed at missing out on what could have been but ultimately accepting it wasn't a bad alternative scenario.
Grade: B-
2000--My best summer since 1990 and my second best summer of all. Like 1990, it was a very transformative summer where I relinquished some old passions and discovered new ones....and where convenient timing set in motion opportunities that would not have been likely to otherwise arise. The summer of 2000 began with my graduating college. I didn't have a job and was feeling nervous about that in the final months of college before it finally hit me that there no urgency for me to find immediate employment and that I could squeeze out some very hard-sought downtime as I did in summers past if employment were to find me later rather than sooner. It was like travelling back in time to the carefree summers in high school those first few weeks, save for the fact that I was spending a few hours per week searching for work and sending resumes in between my road trip planning and retro TV flashbacks. I received a computer for my college graduation gift and it was set up in late June. Early on, the computer was primarily used for job searching but would be used for far more frivolous activities as summer proceeded. In the meantime, my dad needed to go to Bemidji for something old car-related and I tagged along, scoring a swath of new territory I had never visited before. A couple short weeks later, my former college roommate was getting married in Montevideo, Minnesota, providing yet another venue for a weekend road trip where I scored a plethora of new towns and counties in west-central Minnesota. These two road trip opportunities helped me score so many new towns that it took my road trip fever to the next level and made official my quest to visit every single Minnesota community, a goal I had more arbitrarily set in years past. By July's end, road trip fever gave way to internet chatroom fever. I stumbled into the chatrooms accidentally but soon found myself engaged in pressure-cooker political debates in political rooms regarding the upcoming Gore vs. Bush election, which up to that point had seemed rather boring. In the process, I found shockingly many female admirers and took note of the fact that I had finally discovered the venue with which I was able to impress the ladies....the instant message. Amidst all this I was still trying to find a job and paint the house once again. Early interviews were not yielding the hoped-for results, but I was having such a good time with the summer of 2000 that I have to admit I was in no hurry to starting punching time cards on the job. Realizing that my two best summers have come 10 years apart, in 1990 and 2000, my hope is that the pattern continues and 2010 will be my next summer blockbuster.
Grade: A
2001--I was in a bit of a jam this summer. With the economy in recession, I was still unemployed and the interviews were coming fewer and further between. I wasn't completely in panic mode but it was nonetheless getting embarrassing, particularly when I showed up at the five-year class reunion more than a year removed from college without a job. But even under this worrisome cloud, there was a great deal to enjoy about the summer of 2001, not the least of which being the fact that I got to enjoy another laid-back summer at home only doing random odd jobs for family and neighbors to pay my few basic expenses. Those expenses largely consisted of road trips, the spark for which was ignited the summer before and had turned into a raging inferno by this summer, as the highlights of the summer of 2001 included charting as many new towns and townships as possible. Beyond that, I had settled into a late night-only political chatroom pattern where I continued to debate politics in the pressure-cooker environment of a fast-paced internet chat...and with the controversial Bush administration in its early months following the hotly contested November 2000 election, there was still hot fodder for debate and my personal interest in politics escalated to an entirely different level after that election. Lastly, the summer of 2001 was defined by someone I met in the politics chat early in the summer....a Southern belle named Dana. I had exchanged flirty banter with many a gal in political chatrooms up to that point, but seemed to have a much deeper connection with Dana, and our discourse escalated as the summer progressed and it helped me get through an increasingly stressful period of shiftlessness and unemployment. All those combinations of elements helped make the summer of 2001 a good one.
Grade: B+
2002--I had finally found employment at a small-town newspaper early in 2002, and had settled in a little bit by the time summer rolled around. There was a steady amount of responsibilities that included weekend work, and I found it cutting deeply into my schedule to the point that it was a struggle to squeeze in my long list of summer pastimes including road trips and state fairs. It was educational and occasionally intriguing as I conducted my many interviews for the paper, but it felt like quite a jolt at times to go from the zero-responsibility environment of the two summers prior to the high-stress newspaper business, particularly at summer's end when my coworker resigned and I was the only writer on staff for three weeks. But it was the womenfolk who let me down most in the summer of 2002. As is my comedy of errors standard on such matters, I fumbled a would-be love triangle scenario badly. At summer's beginning, Southern belle Dana was poised to make a visit my way at some point in the summer. With this visit more than a year in the making, I began the summer thrilled with the prospect that it was about to happen. However, another girl named Kayla who I had also met online and viewed mainly as a friend was all but throwing herself at me early in the summer. Her come-ons bounced right off as I was holding out for Dana, but by late July, things went dramatically wrong with Dana, who got cold feet, and the visit was off. And by the time I realized Kayla was a prospect worth pursuing, the time had passed on her as well as she had moved on. With the exception of 1996, no other summer ended as badly for me as 2002 did, which cut to the bone considering how promising the summer began.
Grade: C-
2003--The first two-thirds of this summer was largely a blur. In many ways it was a retread of the previous summer, as many of the same events I covered for the newspaper the year before re-emerged in 2003. This was the only summer I worked with quirky and eccentric billionaire editor Barry Westhoff who worked at the paper from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2004. It was another coworker who provided me my few clearcut memories of the first half of the summer of 2003, however, and that coworker was 21-year-old Maggie, an adorable little chick sending me every mixed signal imaginable, going on nightly walks with me through the neighborhood, and inviting me over to her place on weekends when her boyfriend was out of town. Nothing solid ever came of it, but it was a fun little ego trip when it happened. It was the last month of that summer when I finally got my week's vacation time and was able to follow through with the mega-road trip that I'd been planning for for a few years, taking me through the central regions of the Dakotas and the far northern reaches of Minnesota. The weather was bakingly hot just as I prefer it to be on summer road trips and set the stage for a fall that was very eventful for me. Not the most memorable summer of all-time, but in dramatic contrast to the previous summer, it ended with a flourish rather than a crash-landing.
Grade: B-
2004--A most uneventful summer that still stands out memorably. I remember three general things about it. The weather was abnormally cool....to the point that the leaves were beginning to turn by mid-August. It was also the summer where I took three epic long-distance road trips, all enjoyable but perhaps a little too ambitious for two days. But by far the most prominent memory I have of the summer of 2004 was the Presidential election. I ate, slept, and breathed politics all summer...indeed the entire year of 2004....as the campaign drug on for an uninterrupted 11 months unlike any prior Presidential campaign, and I couldn't get enough of it. There were no fewer than three political blogs that I engaged my input on with nearly every waking minute of my downtime, not to mention a great deal of time at the office. Granted, the election campaign seemed to drag on forever with this permanent state of hype, but it made the entire year immeasurably exciting. What would otherwise have been a snoozer of a summer was made interesting because of my engagement in Presidential politics.
Grade: B
2005--After three years of service at the newspaper, I was rewarded with termination in the spring of 2005 with the arrival of a cutthroat new editor. I discovered the paper would have to pay me unemployment for six months and it was game, set, and match. I would move back home to the folks' place till I got my feet on the ground and have a lazy, old-fashioned summer courtesy of St. James Publishing's nickel. Early in the summer was all about decompression. I didn't even bother looking for work until about mid-July as I wanted to make sure the paper was made to pay for my unjustified termination. During that time, I revisited all my passions ranging from road trips to online political chatrooms to retro TV, the latter of which I revisited intensively by ordering several old TV Guides on eBay. It wasn't until late summer that I began to become serious about job searching, and even then there was little urgency as my unemployment checks would keep coming in until November. I enjoyed the road trips and the local and state fairs more that year than any year in recent memory, most likely a product of the renewed freedom I enjoyed. While few events of major consequence occurred that summer, it was nonetheless just what the doctor ordered.
Grade: B+
2006--This was my first summer in central Iowa. As a whole, there's very little to report. Especially then, my job was three months of unproductive leisure, often going weeks with no work coming across the desk, so I was essentially doing the same thing I was the summer before only spending all my time indoors and receiving a much larger paycheck for my troubles. The ample vacation time gave me plenty of opportunity to fit my road trips in along with visits to the local and state fairs. And, of course, it was a midterm election year and the Democrats seemed poised to make huge gains and possibly win back the Congress outright, which I meant I revisited many of the same blogs that I frequented in the 2004 Presidential election year. Nothing much to report beyond that, other than a late summer disappearing act from a long-simmering would-be love interest that ended things on a relatively sour note, but given how much better standing my life and overall financial situation (I finished paying off my student loans) was compared to the years prior, I was still in pretty good spirits.
Grade: B-
2007--Essentially the summer of 2006 redux in many ways, I began the summer on a sour note as a girl I'd been going out with wanted to put on the brakes (she would resurface, but quickly sang the same note again). From there, however, it was more unproductive days at work allowing me ample time to engage in on-the-clock pastimes (all the usual suspects essentially). By summer's end I was heading towards the road trip that would lead to me conquering all 734 of Minnesota's towns, ending a journey that had been in progress for nearly a decade. Another late-summer wrinkle came in the form of a date with an old high school crush finally coming to fruition after months of dead-end e-mail banter. The date never resulted in anything significant, but I was riding pretty high in the lead-up to it. Then I turned 30 years old, fittingly, on a beautiful day at the Minnesota State Fair.
Grade: B
2008--It's probably a little soon to analyze last summer fairly in comparison to its peers. For all intents and purposes it was a replay of the previous two summers with the same speed bumps of road trips and fairs. I moved to a new apartment midsummer, was strung along by another evil girl, and I was on-and-off engaged in the 2008 election season, although not nearly to the extent that I was the 2004 election. Nothing else jumps out as particularly memorable about the summer, but I nonetheless look back at the general trajectory with some fondness.
Grade: B-
There's 26 years worth of summer profiles. Now, as promised, it's time to rank them 1-26:
1. 1990
2. 2000
3. 1997
4. 1994
5. 1988
6. 1983
7. 1989
8. 1998
9. 2001
10. 1991
11. 2005
12. 1987
13. 1984
14. 1986
15. 1992
16. 2007
17. 1985
18. 2004
19. 2003
20. 1999
21. 2006
22. 2008
23. 1993
24. 1995
25. 2002
26. 1996
1983--The first summer for which I have a fair amount of memories. I was five years old for most of the summer (turned 6 in late August) and spent days at the Albert Lea Child Care Center where I hung out with my good buddy Josh. It was clear to everyone I was an eccentric oddball child as I developed obsessive fascinations with the most mundane things, particularly whatever gimmicks the fast-food chains were pushing. This summer, it happened to be Burger King's "Return of the Jedi" glasses and Hardee's "Smurfs" glasses. I spent summer evenings at home watching reruns of "The Fall Guy", "The A-Team", and "T.J. Hooker" with the level of spirit which I watched them during their original airings. Beyond that, I have random memories of afternoon activities in Albert Lea with my mom....back when Albert Lea could be loosely described as a cool town in sharp contrast to today. Late in the summer, we took a family trip to the Black Hills and Devil's Tower which I still remember fondly.
Grade: A-
1984--At six years old and still an oddball child, I took on weird new fascinations with memorizing the TV grid, memorizing the layout of the calendar, memorizing geography statistics and all the Presidents in order, and collecting every box of Crayola crayons the company made (8, 16, 24, 48, and 64). The coloring fascination developed along with my cousin Jamie, who was essentially like a sister to me in my boyhood and who I usually saw at least once a week. Another cousin from northern Minnesota visited with his family and I kept close company with him for a week, developing a bond that would last till our teenage years. I stayed at two different babysitters' places in Hartland while my parents were at work, settling midsummer with Marvyl Kopperud. We took a family vacation to the Ozarks that I still recall vividly, especially since it was the last bona fide family vacation we ever took. Allowed to stay up later in the evenings during summer, I would watch reruns of shows like "Hart to Hart", "Matt Houston", and "Remington Steele" that were on too late for me to watch during the school year. Perhaps as a consequence of the storylines from some of these shows, along with escalating news stories and fear-mongering by my parents, I developed a paranoid fear of being kidnapped that summer. Overall, another good summer but I preferred the year before.
Grade: B+
1985--I was seven years old going on eight in the summer of 1985, which can most accurately be referred to as the baseball and baseball card summer. I had gotten into baseball cards early that year when I had the chicken pox and, much like just about everything else I got into in those days, I became obsessed with it. Staying at Kopperud's place while my parents were at work, I would spend endless hours with their older son comparing cards from various years. I also rarely missed a Game of the Week broadcast that summer and kept close tabs on the then-hapless Minnesota Twins that year, which happened to be the year the Metrodome hosted the All-Star Game. When I wasn't comparing baseball cards while staying at Kopperuds, I'd be watching ABC soap operas and listening to AM radio much of the day. Another visit from my cousin in northern Minnesota livened things up as did my trip with cousin Jamie to Adventureland in Des Moines. The other very exciting development in the summer of 1985 was the promos for a new adventure show coming that fall that absolutely fascinated me. It was called "MacGyver", and I fell in love with the show after seeing the first of its many advertisements. The show would escalate my already intense obsession with TV to an entirely different level in a few short months. While still a decent summer, I have fewer lasting memories from 1985 than the two summers previous.
Grade: B
1986--Another summer generally on par with the summer before it. I was firmly entrenched in late afternoon tae kwon do classes by now and attended a "karate camp" in Mason City where my horsing around swinging from ceiling pipes resulted in me badly bruising my elbow and being taken to the emergency room. My increased awareness of drugs, particularly cocaine, amidst the country's most strident Miami Vice-esque anti-drug climate, formed a hard-core paranoia in me about drug dealers and users that peaked in the summer of 1986. Watching reruns of "MacGyver" was just as fun as watching them the first time around and my days spent at the Kopperuds in Hartland along with visits from all my favorite cousins allowed me to check off all the necessary boxes of must-do summer events. I also added one new summer event to the checklist with my first highly memorable visit to the Minnesota State Fair, which began an annual tradition that has held up for the last 23 years.
Grade: B
1987--I was nine years old by now and generally the same eccentric weirdo I had always been, except now I had a girl on my mind as an elementary crush seemed to be heading in the right direction at the end of third grade, so much so that 1987 was the only summer where I actually looked forward to the return of the school year. Other major events of the summer of 1987 included a drive to Nebraska to visit relatives as well as a visit to an amusement park and a Royals baseball game in Kansas City, and a visit up to northern Minnesota to see my cousin and his family. I was still in tae kwon do classes and still spending days at Kopperuds, where I remember making the two-block pilgrimage every Tuesday morning to the old Sibilrud's grocery store in Hartland to read the brand-new, hot-off-the-presses TV Guide from cover to cover, with the owner/manager having no problem at all letting me stand in the front of the store reading his magazine at no charge and then leaving without buying a single thing. The fact that I had something, or rather someone, to look forward to when I went back to school made the summer all the more likeable.
Grade: B+
1988--This was the summer of the drought, with southern Minnesota temperatures rising above 100 degrees more times in one three-month period than they most likely have in the 20 years since. As a 10-year-old hot lover weather with few responsibilities, I was digging it. This was also the summer of Nickelodeon and swimming lessons in Albert Lea, which were intertwined as I stayed at my grandparents' place in AL for two weeks to take my swimming lessons and obsessively gobbled up as many hours of Nickelodeon's daytime lineup as was possible in the hours when I wasn't swimming. My cousin from northern Minnesota visited twice that summer and stayed at my grandparents' place, enabling me further opportunities to waste countless hours watching the Nickelodeon schedule. During the daytime hours spent at Kopperuds the rest of the summer weeks, I found myself increasingly fascinated with the soap "One Life to Live". My attendance at the AL pool (and my bravery in going off diving boards and the like) escalated after taking my swimming lessons, which I also juggled with my final summer of tae kwon do classes. Wrapping up the summer was a group visit to the Minnesota State Fair with both of my favorite cousins. Overall, my most memorable summer up to that point.
Grade: A-
1989--At 11 years old, this is the last of what I consider my "boyhood summers", but it was a good one as I finnagled two visits to northern Minnesota with my grandparents to see my cousin up there, one of which we travelled up to Winnipeg, Canada. My cousin would come down in August for the Freeborn County Fair, and we went every day to squander every dime we had on junk food, midway rides, mini-golf and BINGO! It was the last summer I would spend at Kopperuds place in Hartland, but things livened up there when they got hooked up with cable midsummer and I got to watch morning reruns of "The Fall Guy" and "T.J. Hooker" every day. Keeping on the TV theme (lifelong obsession), I was fully in tune with "MacGyver" during the summer rerun period of the series' best season. Another obsession was born by summer's end when my uncle purchased a Nintendo system that was readily available at my grandma's every time I visited. I had dabbled with Nintendo here and there prior to that, but this was my first steady diet and it inspired much more extensive interest in the months ahead. I had just finished the first school year where I felt good about my performance and had lofty dreams of continuing that roll as I proceeded into sixth grade, but my momentum seemed to hit a brick wall and I fell into my old habits of mischievous behavior and lack of sufficient interest in my studies. Nonetheless, another great summer just narrowly less impressive and memorable than the summer before it.
Grade: A-
1990--Without a doubt, the best and most transformative summer of my life. My dad had gotten laid off along with everyone else at the Farmstead meatpacking plant in Albert Lea, so he was looking for work. That meant no more spending days at the Kopperuds and instead full-time lounging at the folks' rural acreage. I exploited this newfound freedom by staying up every evening till all the area stations signed off, watching "Night Court" and "Entertainment Tonight", among other things. "Entertainment Tonight" presented an intriguing metaphor as I found myself developing a crush on weekend anchor Leeza Gibbons. She was my first "adult celebrity" crush at the precipice of my threshold-crossing into the time when boys start having different kinds of feelings about the opposite sex. By summer's end, when I turned 13, I was well on my way to being a typical horny teenager at the perfect time as I was about to go into 7th grade in a different town with some different classmates, including a new batch of girls whose cusp-of-womanhood assets would really accelerate my hormones to raging levels. Other highlights of the summer of 1990 were the crossing of two passions. My TV obsession would begin to wane following the summer of 1990 but my newfound passion for road trips, still with me today, was officially born. It started when I went with my mom to my cousin's in northern Minnesota, and from there up to Winnipeg, Canada. Rather than dreading the eight-hour drive each way, I found myself loving it that year. The following month would further ignite my travelling passion as I tagged along with my dad every day as he did vinyl repair work in car lots throughout southern Minnesota. The monthlong experience influenced me in countless ways despite the overall unlikelihood that my dad and I would ever be able to get along in such close quarters for such an extended period of time. Beyond all of that, there were two visits from my cousin up north, one that included a trip to Valleyfair and the second during Freeborn County Fair week. In no other summer do I remember virtually every week's events as vividly as I do this summer. It was the perfect summer at the perfect time in my life.
Grade: A+
1991--Lingering memories of the previous summer created a sense of nostalgia this year when I was 13 going on 14. I knew I'd never be able to recreate the magic of the year before but my shtick is to always try to. A thorn in my side this summer was an extreme self-consciousness that frequently bordered on depression, largely the product of a hormonal early teen boy who couldn't seem to get the kind of positive attention he was hoping for from the girls he lusted for. It was largely the usual issues of teen angst, but it hit its peak this summer as I attempted to isolate myself as often as possible. The positive developments of the summer of 1991 included my first annual MacGyver Marathon (only a partial at that time that included the 44 episodes I had on tape up to that point), the Cinderella story that was the 1991 Minnesota Twins that started to take form early that summer, our family visit to the Noah's Ark water park in Wisconsin Dells, and the first annual safari to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a long-standing tradition that is largely a nostalgic nod to the days I travelled the car lots of southern Minnesota with my dad. My dad had a seasonal job over the fall, winter, and spring for a few years so he was home with me most summer days, which was largely a double-edged sword. It was the first summer I did some paid yard work for family friends in Hartland and the last hurrah for my baseball card collecting as I enjoyed a brief spurt of renewed interest in the pastime before giving it up for good. A far cry from the summer prior, but nonetheless a place in time I generally remember fondly.
Grade: B+
1992--This was the summer of classic MacGyver and the Minnesota Twins. After the prior season's surprise World Series win, I was fully engaged in what appeared to be another great season for my team, and as a consequence listened to almost every Twins game broadcast on radio. The Twins had a number of locally available TV broadcasts that summer as well, allowing me the chance to watch a game or two every week. The Twins fizzled in August that year, but it was a fun ride up to that point. "MacGyver" wrapped up its run in May 1992, which renewed my interest in getting the old episodes recorded. My grandma was the only one I knew with cable access, so my summer mission was to piecemeal as many early episodes as possible and add them to my collection. Every opportunity that arose, I would tag along with my mom to town and tape a cable repeat of an old MacGyver episode, many of which I hadn't seen in 5-7 years. Beyond the Twins and MacGyver reruns, 1992 wasn't one of my most memorable summers. I spent alot of time learning new census figures and obsessing about travelling Minnesota, even though I didn't get to explore much new terrain that summer. I had a passing interest in the emerging 1992 Presidential election, but by summer there was a long lull in the action except for the two conventions, both of which depressed me as I watched the Democratic party move to the center (not where I was) at the beginning of the Clinton years. Visits from my cousin became fewer and summer ended with his single visit during a pretty bleak stretch of days weatherwise that chilled our plans. I was 14 going on 15 this summer, high school-bound in the fall and finding myself nervous about rising performance expectations as a college-bound student. That made the summer of 1992 one of the harder ones to let go of.
Grade: B
1993--This was one of my weakest summers. It was memorable, but not necessarily for the right reasons. I attended drivers education classes in New Richland for three weeks in June and took to the streets and highways for the first time, disastrously, in August, and I proved to be slower to become comfortable with the wheel than most. My dad had just been laid off from his seasonal chemical plant job as the place shut down its Albert Lea operations, so he was now in my face every day and becoming increasingly annoying to me as we worked to put siding up on the farm buildings. Of course, 1993 was the flooding year, and I remember the cool, dreary weather that never seemed to clear up, with skies opening up early and often, even to the point where we had to clean up a little water in our basement for the first time ever. Still, it was nothing compared to the footage I watched on the news nearly every night of widespread flooding devastation in Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois. I started the summer as I had the previous listening to every Twins game on the radio, but when they were below .500 by the All Star Break and seemingly going nowhere, I gave up on them and found other ways to occupy my evenings. And as a consequence of overdosing on red Jell-O at some point in July, I would break out in hives for the next few months every time my body temperature rose, making any physical activity or public situation a nightmare for me. My fondest memories of the summer of 1993 involved my nightly TV ritual which included my first complete MacGyver Marathon (by now I had all the cable reruns recorded) along with late-night reruns of "Night Court" and "Growing Pains" that held up well. The summer nonetheless ended with a thud as a family trip up to my cousin's in northern Minnesota turned into an unmitigated disaster...so bad in fact I outlined the trip in a sophomore year speech in English class that illicited numerous laughs for its "vacation from hell" bona fides. Easily the weakest summer up to this point.
Grade: C+
1994--The comparatively bleak prior summer gave way to one of my favorite summers in 1994. The summer started with a sort of cousin reunion as I attended my favorite cousin's graduation in northern Minnesota in the company of Jamie, the younger cousin from back home who I was closest with. Amazingly, all three of us still seemed to click with the level of friendship we always had. My grandpa narrowly escaped death but the close call led festering family tensions to come to a boil on my dad's side and unfolded entertainingly as the summer transpired. For his part, my dad was stuck doing a bunch of crappy, short-term jobs to pay the bills, which at the very least enabled me to have my first summer spent mostly to myself at the farm, where I would get into all kinds of mischief including digging through closets for long-lost toys and papers as well as fashioning makeshift bombs out of household materials. I revisited my 80s TV obsession for the first time with any level of intensity early in the summer of 1994, and really got in the spirit when I was able to occasionally watch middle-of-the-night reruns of "The Fall Guy" and "The A-Team" on a syndicated Twin Cities station when the air conditions were just right to get it in. This nostalgia trip was at least partly responsible for my own creative renaissance as I began cranking out my "Alex Burrows" adventure scripts with regularity. But perhaps the most defining aspect of the summer of 1994 was that it was my summer of country music. I had dabbled in the genre throughout the 80s and early 90s, but found myself increasingly fascinated at some point in my sophomore year of high school, ultimately leading to my usual obsessive-compulsive fixation. It's easy to see why looking back as 1994 was easily the most progressive and outside-the-box year in country music's history. My fascination ultimately led me to track the chart movement of country songs every Saturday when the top-40 Countdown aired. This all culminated with a birthday gift of a CD player for my 17th birthday in late August and my attending the Faith Hill concert at the Freeborn County Fair. For whatever reason, I became comfortable in my own skin that summer in a way I hadn't been in several years prior, my teen angst issues being past their peak. This all made for my best summer of my high school years.
Grade: A
1995--Easily the blandest summer of my entire life. One would think the summer before my senior year of high school would be full of great memories, but I can only remember a handful of things after the month of June. In June, I was present when escalating tensions on the Hagen side of the family came to a head one tense Saturday night and made permanent a rift in the family that had begun to emerge the summer prior. I also finally took my driver's exam and passed on the second try, and helped my dad paint the house before June came to a close. After that, he got called back to work on the railroad (where he finally got his big break after five years of trying to find his footing) and I was home alone every day, where I should have been working at a summer job but had no car to get to one. The previous summer I was still in a carefree state of mind, but by the summer of 1995 the fast-approaching high school graduation was starting to become real to me. As someone who has never handled change very well, that kind of cramped my style. The only specific memories I have of the second half of the summer of '95 was a continued obsession with tracking the country music charts even though the quality of the music was beginning to decline compared to that of the previous summer. While I don't necessarily have a trove of negative memories from this summer, the lack of any memories at all underscores just how mundane it was. Yet I distinctly remember that it seemed like the summer nonetheless flew by despite its mediocrity.
Grade: C
1996--The previous summer may have been my blandest of all-time, but the summer of 1996 was hands-down the worst. I was in an emotional funk out of the starting gate following high school graduation and setting foot out into the real world (or so I told myself at least). I went on a brief wild goose chase to my aunt's place up in the Cities when she thought she could get me in at the factory where she worked in Plymouth. The prospect of driving in the Cities seemed poised to become very real very fast for me until I got a better job offer back home (again...or so I thought) before I even started in the Cities. I ended up toiling 12-hour days in an Owatonna canning factory for a few weeks before I got fired and replaced with the boss' nephew/neighbor/godson. Beginning in mid-July, I was done working for the summer (except for a few odd jobs for relatives and neighbors) and left with nothing to do but wallow in angst over the coming freshman year of college, which I desperately dreaded. Making matters worse, much of my downtime was spent reading a dreadfully insipid book that was our pre-homework project for beginning school. For one final summer, I tracked the country music charts even though the music was fast becoming trite and bland, and where most of the songs I liked seem to flop. Later in the summer, I became more engaged in the Presidential race, even though it was largely a foregone conclusion that Clinton would beat Dole and secure a second term effortlessly. Even though I wasn't in a mood to enjoy it, the summer ended memorably with an encounter at the Minnesota State Fair that would set the stage for my preferences in females for years to come and with my first visit to the Mall of America. Never at any point in my past was I as down on life as I was in 1996, so I would have had to have stumbled into all kinds of good fortune to felt a reversal in my attitude. Needless to say, it didn't happen that summer.
Grade: F
1997--After a solid year of making myself miserable about college, I began the summer of 1997 having a intangible feeling that times were about to get better....and was I ever right. The sweet relief of walking away from campus after that miserable freshman year was priceless in itself, but the ability to reconnect with my Freeborn County comfort zone was desperately needed and lived up to expectations completely. I started a new summer job, which in the past would have been a source of trepidation for me, but I guess I could just feel going in that I was cruising into a slacker gig when I got hired at the rural electric co-op in Albert Lea with a cushy 7-3:30 schedule. The deal became even sweeter when I discovered that the other summer employee was none other than high school neighbor buddy Jason Hoerler, with whom I toiled in three months worth of mindless and laid-back busywork. I couldn't have asked for a better arrangement, and the abundance of leisure time enabled me to afford plenty of renewed focus on long-standing obsessions like summer road trips and 80s TV, the latter of which was being rerun on the FX cable available at my grandma's place where I spent ample time videotaping shows like "The Fall Guy", "A-Team", and "Miami Vice" for future viewing. Since I only had one channel on TV at college, I was also able to catch up on contemporary favorites like "High Incident" and "Viper" during summer reruns. As summer neared its end, I found myself slumbering back into my melancholy "back to school" mode of the summer before, although not quite as bad. Even so, 1997 was my best summer since 1990 during that decade and a desperately needed retreat from where I had been.
Grade: A
1998--My second year of college wasn't as horrible as my first, meaning my euphoria at returning home for the summer wasn't at the level it was the prior summer. An opening for a casual carrier at the Albert Lea Post Office surfaced and I took it, which was a source of some trepidation heading into my training period. The first month of the new summer was challenging as the postal carrying job proved tougher than I had originally expected and also more consuming as I worked six days a week. But by the 4th of July or so, I had settled into a groove at the job and began to like it. Furthermore, I found myself inexplicably falling for my casual carrier coworker and realizing in time the feeling was at least partially mutual. No sooner did our courtship begin before it was forced to end, with unfulfilled assurances to reconnect the following summer. The postal job essentially represented every memorable aspect of my summer in 1998, but nonetheless afforded me countless opportunities to grow and insights about myself that continued to percolate into my junior year of college. By summer's end, I had turned 21 and had for all intents and purposes just had my first real job.
Grade: B+
1999--No summer in my past (or hopefully in my future) has ever gotten off to as disastrous of a start as the summer of 1999 did. Within 10 minutes after arriving home from my junior year of college for the summer, I discovered that the postal job I was planning to return to was no longer available and that the hot chick postal coworker I was planning to resume my would-be romance with did not return home for the summer. The gut punch kept me off balance for quite awhile, but I was fortunate enough to get my old summer job at Freeborn-Mower Electric in Albert Lea back. I remained down those first few weeks of summer, but eventually came to appreciate things had turned out about as good as could be expected given the hand I was dealt. While I didn't feel the same "perfect summer job" vibe this year that I had when I worked at the co-op two summers prior, I found myself digging the cushy workload and accommodating schedule as the months pushed forward. I never really felt the impending unease about the approaching end of college the way I did the approaching end of high school at that point in 1995, but still found myself nervous at times about what laid ahead. For the most part though, I just cruised through another summer at home, disappointed at missing out on what could have been but ultimately accepting it wasn't a bad alternative scenario.
Grade: B-
2000--My best summer since 1990 and my second best summer of all. Like 1990, it was a very transformative summer where I relinquished some old passions and discovered new ones....and where convenient timing set in motion opportunities that would not have been likely to otherwise arise. The summer of 2000 began with my graduating college. I didn't have a job and was feeling nervous about that in the final months of college before it finally hit me that there no urgency for me to find immediate employment and that I could squeeze out some very hard-sought downtime as I did in summers past if employment were to find me later rather than sooner. It was like travelling back in time to the carefree summers in high school those first few weeks, save for the fact that I was spending a few hours per week searching for work and sending resumes in between my road trip planning and retro TV flashbacks. I received a computer for my college graduation gift and it was set up in late June. Early on, the computer was primarily used for job searching but would be used for far more frivolous activities as summer proceeded. In the meantime, my dad needed to go to Bemidji for something old car-related and I tagged along, scoring a swath of new territory I had never visited before. A couple short weeks later, my former college roommate was getting married in Montevideo, Minnesota, providing yet another venue for a weekend road trip where I scored a plethora of new towns and counties in west-central Minnesota. These two road trip opportunities helped me score so many new towns that it took my road trip fever to the next level and made official my quest to visit every single Minnesota community, a goal I had more arbitrarily set in years past. By July's end, road trip fever gave way to internet chatroom fever. I stumbled into the chatrooms accidentally but soon found myself engaged in pressure-cooker political debates in political rooms regarding the upcoming Gore vs. Bush election, which up to that point had seemed rather boring. In the process, I found shockingly many female admirers and took note of the fact that I had finally discovered the venue with which I was able to impress the ladies....the instant message. Amidst all this I was still trying to find a job and paint the house once again. Early interviews were not yielding the hoped-for results, but I was having such a good time with the summer of 2000 that I have to admit I was in no hurry to starting punching time cards on the job. Realizing that my two best summers have come 10 years apart, in 1990 and 2000, my hope is that the pattern continues and 2010 will be my next summer blockbuster.
Grade: A
2001--I was in a bit of a jam this summer. With the economy in recession, I was still unemployed and the interviews were coming fewer and further between. I wasn't completely in panic mode but it was nonetheless getting embarrassing, particularly when I showed up at the five-year class reunion more than a year removed from college without a job. But even under this worrisome cloud, there was a great deal to enjoy about the summer of 2001, not the least of which being the fact that I got to enjoy another laid-back summer at home only doing random odd jobs for family and neighbors to pay my few basic expenses. Those expenses largely consisted of road trips, the spark for which was ignited the summer before and had turned into a raging inferno by this summer, as the highlights of the summer of 2001 included charting as many new towns and townships as possible. Beyond that, I had settled into a late night-only political chatroom pattern where I continued to debate politics in the pressure-cooker environment of a fast-paced internet chat...and with the controversial Bush administration in its early months following the hotly contested November 2000 election, there was still hot fodder for debate and my personal interest in politics escalated to an entirely different level after that election. Lastly, the summer of 2001 was defined by someone I met in the politics chat early in the summer....a Southern belle named Dana. I had exchanged flirty banter with many a gal in political chatrooms up to that point, but seemed to have a much deeper connection with Dana, and our discourse escalated as the summer progressed and it helped me get through an increasingly stressful period of shiftlessness and unemployment. All those combinations of elements helped make the summer of 2001 a good one.
Grade: B+
2002--I had finally found employment at a small-town newspaper early in 2002, and had settled in a little bit by the time summer rolled around. There was a steady amount of responsibilities that included weekend work, and I found it cutting deeply into my schedule to the point that it was a struggle to squeeze in my long list of summer pastimes including road trips and state fairs. It was educational and occasionally intriguing as I conducted my many interviews for the paper, but it felt like quite a jolt at times to go from the zero-responsibility environment of the two summers prior to the high-stress newspaper business, particularly at summer's end when my coworker resigned and I was the only writer on staff for three weeks. But it was the womenfolk who let me down most in the summer of 2002. As is my comedy of errors standard on such matters, I fumbled a would-be love triangle scenario badly. At summer's beginning, Southern belle Dana was poised to make a visit my way at some point in the summer. With this visit more than a year in the making, I began the summer thrilled with the prospect that it was about to happen. However, another girl named Kayla who I had also met online and viewed mainly as a friend was all but throwing herself at me early in the summer. Her come-ons bounced right off as I was holding out for Dana, but by late July, things went dramatically wrong with Dana, who got cold feet, and the visit was off. And by the time I realized Kayla was a prospect worth pursuing, the time had passed on her as well as she had moved on. With the exception of 1996, no other summer ended as badly for me as 2002 did, which cut to the bone considering how promising the summer began.
Grade: C-
2003--The first two-thirds of this summer was largely a blur. In many ways it was a retread of the previous summer, as many of the same events I covered for the newspaper the year before re-emerged in 2003. This was the only summer I worked with quirky and eccentric billionaire editor Barry Westhoff who worked at the paper from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2004. It was another coworker who provided me my few clearcut memories of the first half of the summer of 2003, however, and that coworker was 21-year-old Maggie, an adorable little chick sending me every mixed signal imaginable, going on nightly walks with me through the neighborhood, and inviting me over to her place on weekends when her boyfriend was out of town. Nothing solid ever came of it, but it was a fun little ego trip when it happened. It was the last month of that summer when I finally got my week's vacation time and was able to follow through with the mega-road trip that I'd been planning for for a few years, taking me through the central regions of the Dakotas and the far northern reaches of Minnesota. The weather was bakingly hot just as I prefer it to be on summer road trips and set the stage for a fall that was very eventful for me. Not the most memorable summer of all-time, but in dramatic contrast to the previous summer, it ended with a flourish rather than a crash-landing.
Grade: B-
2004--A most uneventful summer that still stands out memorably. I remember three general things about it. The weather was abnormally cool....to the point that the leaves were beginning to turn by mid-August. It was also the summer where I took three epic long-distance road trips, all enjoyable but perhaps a little too ambitious for two days. But by far the most prominent memory I have of the summer of 2004 was the Presidential election. I ate, slept, and breathed politics all summer...indeed the entire year of 2004....as the campaign drug on for an uninterrupted 11 months unlike any prior Presidential campaign, and I couldn't get enough of it. There were no fewer than three political blogs that I engaged my input on with nearly every waking minute of my downtime, not to mention a great deal of time at the office. Granted, the election campaign seemed to drag on forever with this permanent state of hype, but it made the entire year immeasurably exciting. What would otherwise have been a snoozer of a summer was made interesting because of my engagement in Presidential politics.
Grade: B
2005--After three years of service at the newspaper, I was rewarded with termination in the spring of 2005 with the arrival of a cutthroat new editor. I discovered the paper would have to pay me unemployment for six months and it was game, set, and match. I would move back home to the folks' place till I got my feet on the ground and have a lazy, old-fashioned summer courtesy of St. James Publishing's nickel. Early in the summer was all about decompression. I didn't even bother looking for work until about mid-July as I wanted to make sure the paper was made to pay for my unjustified termination. During that time, I revisited all my passions ranging from road trips to online political chatrooms to retro TV, the latter of which I revisited intensively by ordering several old TV Guides on eBay. It wasn't until late summer that I began to become serious about job searching, and even then there was little urgency as my unemployment checks would keep coming in until November. I enjoyed the road trips and the local and state fairs more that year than any year in recent memory, most likely a product of the renewed freedom I enjoyed. While few events of major consequence occurred that summer, it was nonetheless just what the doctor ordered.
Grade: B+
2006--This was my first summer in central Iowa. As a whole, there's very little to report. Especially then, my job was three months of unproductive leisure, often going weeks with no work coming across the desk, so I was essentially doing the same thing I was the summer before only spending all my time indoors and receiving a much larger paycheck for my troubles. The ample vacation time gave me plenty of opportunity to fit my road trips in along with visits to the local and state fairs. And, of course, it was a midterm election year and the Democrats seemed poised to make huge gains and possibly win back the Congress outright, which I meant I revisited many of the same blogs that I frequented in the 2004 Presidential election year. Nothing much to report beyond that, other than a late summer disappearing act from a long-simmering would-be love interest that ended things on a relatively sour note, but given how much better standing my life and overall financial situation (I finished paying off my student loans) was compared to the years prior, I was still in pretty good spirits.
Grade: B-
2007--Essentially the summer of 2006 redux in many ways, I began the summer on a sour note as a girl I'd been going out with wanted to put on the brakes (she would resurface, but quickly sang the same note again). From there, however, it was more unproductive days at work allowing me ample time to engage in on-the-clock pastimes (all the usual suspects essentially). By summer's end I was heading towards the road trip that would lead to me conquering all 734 of Minnesota's towns, ending a journey that had been in progress for nearly a decade. Another late-summer wrinkle came in the form of a date with an old high school crush finally coming to fruition after months of dead-end e-mail banter. The date never resulted in anything significant, but I was riding pretty high in the lead-up to it. Then I turned 30 years old, fittingly, on a beautiful day at the Minnesota State Fair.
Grade: B
2008--It's probably a little soon to analyze last summer fairly in comparison to its peers. For all intents and purposes it was a replay of the previous two summers with the same speed bumps of road trips and fairs. I moved to a new apartment midsummer, was strung along by another evil girl, and I was on-and-off engaged in the 2008 election season, although not nearly to the extent that I was the 2004 election. Nothing else jumps out as particularly memorable about the summer, but I nonetheless look back at the general trajectory with some fondness.
Grade: B-
There's 26 years worth of summer profiles. Now, as promised, it's time to rank them 1-26:
1. 1990
2. 2000
3. 1997
4. 1994
5. 1988
6. 1983
7. 1989
8. 1998
9. 2001
10. 1991
11. 2005
12. 1987
13. 1984
14. 1986
15. 1992
16. 2007
17. 1985
18. 2004
19. 2003
20. 1999
21. 2006
22. 2008
23. 1993
24. 1995
25. 2002
26. 1996
posted by Mark at 11:02 AM
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