So How Did Last Summer Stack Up?

This is my favorite time of year, at the threshold of summer with warm weather and sunny skies as far as the eye can see. Last year, I had all kinds of fun profiling and ranking every summer dating back to 1983, when I was five years old. With a year's worth of distance since the summer of 2009, I feel as though I can now speculate on how it stacked up compared to other summers. The diagnosis: pretty darn good.

In the summer of 2009, I lucked out with fantastic weather for all of my summer road trips. I got to go to my first Minnesota Twins game in years in the final year that they played in the Metrodome, the stadium which helped the Twins score two World Series victories. I got to make two visits to the Minnesota State Fair for the first time ever, and got a much nicer day the second trip than the first. And I was also going out with a cute 19-year-old college girl whose presence I always felt comfortable with, our courtship capstoning with an impressive visit to a waterpark in eastern Iowa last August. Overall, I just had a good vibe from the summer of 2009, probably my best summer since 2000 and easily upstaging the summer of 2008, which seems even more mediocre when stacked up to 2009. Grade: A-

The best two summers of my life were 1990 and 2000, which suggests that 2010 should be spectacular as well if the current pattern holds. There's no evidence yet that this summer is poised to be a classic, but it's obviously early. The sense of "morning in America" that I always feel this time of year is what makes it so exciting though as its perhaps the only time every year where I feel an undercurrent of hope that lasting memories could be just around the corner. I may be a cynical pessimist 11 months a year, but in June I'm an optomist.