Another Decade of Summers Profiled
It was 10 years ago on this blog that I did an in-depth profile of every summer I recalled from my earliest childhood memories from 1983 up until 2008. It was a fun exercise in nostalgia, and every June that nostalgia rushes back from my childhood....the golden memories of walking out of school that last time for the year and venturing into the carefree days of summer in rural Minnesota. A decade removed from those original ratings, I figured it would be fun to revisit the original list based on some additional reflection.....and to update it with ratings for the 10 summers that followed it up. I'll start with a revisit of the original 25 summers that I profiled back in 2009.....
1983--A-
1984--B+
1985--B
1986--B
1987--B+
1988--A-
1989--B+
1990--A+
1991--A-
1992--B
1993--C+
1994--A
1995--C
1996--F
1997--A
1998--B+
1999--B-
2000--A
2001--A-
2002--C-
2003--B-
2004--B
2005--B+
2006--B+
2007--B+
2008--B-
The top of the pyramid for me remains the summer of 1990, and in general those late 80s and early 90s summers of my formative adolescent years were the most impactful. And there was enough variety in nearly all of these 25 summers that the memories rarely run together. It's interesting how the events of the most recent 10 summers are more likely to run together in my mind than the events of my childhood, but that's largely the way the brain works, and mine in particular.
Obviously the magic of summers from my youth were hard to replicate in my 30s, but I still had plenty of great moments in the previous decade. In one sense I've fallen into a pattern of events to follow most summers, but largely in keeping with activities I enjoy and which define summer for me. Plus I try to mix in a vacation and some other events to give each summer its own unique identity even as I approach middle-age. With that in mind, here are my ratings from the 10 summers since my original writeup a decade ago....
2009--More often than not, I can sense greatness going into a given summer, and I sensed it in 2009. I watched the Minnesota Twins play one last time in Metrodome in their final season there. I had a successful fair season capstoned by a Labor Day weekend do-over for the Minnesota State Fair, where I went to the Great Minnesota Get-Together a second weekend in a row, a tradition I've maintained in the decade after concluding that one visit per year isn't enough. I had a very light load at work that summer and had time to revisit favorite series "The Fall Guy" and "New York Undercover" for the first time in more than a decade. My big August vacation was to Minot, North Dakota, not exactly a tourist mecca but an off-the-beaten-path destination that also led me through the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation and the International Peace Gardens on the Canada-North Dakota border. But most memorable of all in the summer of 2009 was my whirlwind summer romance with a college-aged girl who I really connected with, capstoned with a water park date in northeastern Iowa that remains the gold standard of my summer dating memories. When I wrote the blog post rhapsodizing about great summers 10 years ago this week, I didn't realize I was just about to embark on one of the best. Grade: A-
2010--My two favorite summers of my youth were 1990 and 2000, so if the pattern held, 2010 should have been the next great one. It didn't turn out that way and the summer ended up pretty mediocre. My summer fling from the year before didn't come together for an encore which from the get-go cast a pall on my aspirations. I had one of my most successful summer fair seasons of all-time with concerts by Rosanne Cash and Jo Dee Messina, among others. The fair season generally was the high point of the summer of 2010. My inaugural visit to Target Field, the new stadium of the Minnesota Twins, went okay but it was a cool and damp night that doesn't really hold up as a paragon of summer baseball memories. I had an interesting August vacation to the Wisconsin south shore of Lake Superior and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but I had a sore throat foreshadowing a bad cold on the first day of the vacation so that took some of the wind out of that sail. I could tell the Democrats were poised to take a pounding in the first Obama midterm so it was very hard to get into politics as summer pressed onward. Overall the summer was by no means a disaster but didn't live up to my lofty expectations and fell far short of the summer that preceded it. Grade: B-
2011--Even though little of consequence happened this summer, with more impactful events happening just before and just after summer, I still have a soft spot for it. I revisited the Burnsville Mall, the shopping center that shaped my childhood shopping memories more than any other, that June for the first time in nearly 20 years and, amazingly, it was almost exactly as I remembered it from the late 80s, particularly the "food court" offerings. It was another great fair season involving the county fair I grew up along with two visits each to the Iowa State Fair and the Minnesota State Fair with multiple country and classic rock concerts including the Beach Boys. My big summer vacation that August was a venture to the Badlands and Black Hills. I had gone to the same area in 2008 and had a great time, but there was still enough to see and do that I decided to go back and take on some more pastimes in 2011, including a drive home through the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations. It was also a really hot July with temps hitting 100 degrees in the Upper Midwest on a few occasions, mercifully convincing my folks to get their air conditioning fixed after sweating it out through the summer of 2010 without A/C. It was a time and place I enjoyed even though it was by no means the best summer of my life, and definitely a tick above the summer that preceded it. Grade: B
2012--It's not the case that every summer preceding a Presidential election dominates my time and enthusiasm, but 2012 was certainly a politics-dominated summer in much the way that 2004 was. In both cases, the election was fought on conventional turf defining the governing philosophies of the two parties in their purest forms, and those are the elections that interest me most. Obama vs. Romney fit the bill of that type of election and while I always thought Obama was favored to win, it was no sure thing and it was really fun watching his campaign outmaneuver Romney almost every step of the way. Unfortunately, almost nothing else from the summer of 2012 was particularly memorable. I turned 35 in late August and while that didn't seem like a huge deal at the time, it was a bit of a tipping point in terms of shrinking the dating pool, which had been extremely abundant in my early 30s. The 2012 fair season was decent but unremarkable, the same as could be said about my August vacation to the Teddy Roosevelt National Park in southwestern North Dakota where I was a bit ambitious in how much ground I could cover in a couple of days and still enjoy myself. It was a very dry and hot summer in the Upper Midwest, with several days over 100 degrees and the grass turning brown from lack of precipitation, the most serious drought for the region since the late 1980s. Ultimately though, the excitement of the approaching Presidential election defined the summer and its memories for me, mostly in a good way. Grade: B-
2013--I reconnected with a gal I had dated a few years earlier this summer and while we had high hopes, the lack of chemistry that bedeviled us in 2010 continued to be an obstacle in 2013. That was a disappointment, but we still had a couple of fun dates, particularly when we went to Adventureland amusement park in Des Moines. Luckily for me, there was some other good stuff going on that kept from bringing me down. One of my most epic road trips of all-time was the three-day safari through the central Dakotas and then across the Minnesota-Canadian border and down through the Iron Range home. I went on that original trip in 2003 and felt it overdue for a 10-year revival in 2013. While the weather wasn't as consistently perfect as it was for that flagship trip in 2003, the magic was back in almost every other tangible way and carried me to a very diverse spectrum of landscapes and geographic quirks. I also happened to be in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on the night of the Brown County Fair where I attended and saw country singer Brantley Gilbert perform. Kenny Rogers and Chris Cagle were a couple of the other performers who defined the successful summer fair season. And I also had a great summer TV show to obsess over with NBC's goofy but well-executed multiple personality thriller "Do No Harm", on top of the final season of the long-running summer series "Burn Notice" and a successful launch of the USA Network's interesting "Graceland" series. I wouldn't say that all of my high expectations for the summer were met, but it plugged along better than most in the past decade. Grade: B
2014--This was the least satisfying summer of the last decade for me. I had an issue at work that caused me some problems early in the summer. I had a couple would-be relationships that started red hot but fell apart almost immediately, cratering my self-esteem. And I erred with a solo trip to a water park for nostalgic purposes that ended up just being lonely and depressing. I took my big summer vacation several weeks earlier than usual, right after the 4th of July, and went to the Fox Valley and coastal Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. It wasn't a bad trip by any means but also wasn't one of my favorites. The one unconditionally good development of the summer of 2014 was the short-lived Fox action-drama "Gang Related", far and away my favorite TV series of the past decade even though it went away far too quickly. Beyond that, I had a pretty good fair season in August so the summer ended on a high note, but when I look back at the summers of the past decade, 2014 was the clear low-hanging fruit of the bunch. Grade: C-
2015--While I remember 2014 mostly for its disappointments, 2015 is a summer I really don't remember that well at all and where so many of my memories run together with other years. Summer got off to a late start as the Iowa Legislature for whom I work didn't adjourn until the first week of June, several weeks behind schedule. There were no defining TV shows or fun side trips from the summer and I was disengaged from the dating scene. I wrapped the summer up with a memorable trip to the Ozarks and eastern Plains, and also test-drove a new entry in my summer fair tour, going to Sedalia, Missouri, for that state's fair for the first time and enjoyed it, redneck culture shock and all. The quality fair season and that Ozarks vacation stand out as the only genuinely memorable moments of the summer for me though. Grade: C+
2016--Another summer that wasn't fantastic but had a few more memorable moments than the one that preceded it. Just before summer started I had a memorable stint on jury duty that was more fun than I anticipated. Beyond that, I visited a couple of friends out of state and took an epic August road trip to the Mississippi River Delta of the Upper South in states like Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Missouri bootheel, and southern Illinois. I also attended my 20-year high school class reunion, which I had mixed feelings about but mostly positive as I have favorable associations with high school and my former classmates. The summer fair season was okay but not one of my favorites, nor was the Presidential campaign season of 2016. Obviously, whenever you're talking about a Presidential election year, I had an above-average level of buzz about politics, but I didn't like either candidate or the general direction of politics in America. My apprehension was more than justified based on the election's eventual outcome, but as of the summer of 2016, I was still pretty convinced that Donald Trump was never gonna be elected President. Grade: B-
2017--Now we're talking! At least for the first half of the summer of 2017, I was happily in a relationship that was ongoing from spring, and I had a flurry of great memories from that relationship including the best 4th of July of my life. Unfortunately it ended by midsummer, but even after that I had an oddball fling with a neighbor's friend in the closing weeks of summer. It was the last summer of my 30s and went out with a bang with a successful fair season that softened the blow of my 40th birthday in late August. My late summer vacation was to the eastern Midwest where I explored Indiana and western Ohio. While it wasn't the most thrilling of my vacations, it was an area I hadn't been to since I was a small child and I checked off another state fair from my list when I went to the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis. It's a big and impressive state fair, although I wasn't thrilled with the layout, where the grounds encircles a gigantic racetrack. Usually my summers are backloaded with most of the good times coming in August, but this was a summer that had exciting moments and great memories from beginning to end. It was certainly sad when the relationship fell apart by mid-July though and that keeps this summer from being as satisfying as 2009, but it was easily my second-best summer of the last 10 years. Grade: B+
2018--Mediocrity. The awesomeness of the preceding summer made 2018 seem all the more pale by comparison. There was nothing specifically wrong with it and I was lucky to thread a needle with my fair visits as it seemed to be rainy every day before and after my tours of the Freeborn County, Iowa State, and Minnesota State Fairs, along with a return visit to the Missouri State Fair, but it was dry the day of each respective fair. My August trip was to the Rocky Mountain foothills in Colorado and the Nebraska Sandhills. I generally enjoyed it but find the blandness of Kansas and especially Nebraska were a pretty high price to pay to visit Colorado, and it doesn't help that my long-standing streak of negative associations in Nebraska continued with a fumbled attempt to visit the Capitol building in Lincoln along with a messy hourlong traffic jam on the freeway near Omaha that I found myself trapped in after a very long time in the car driving from Denver toward Des Moines. I was engaged in the election midterm campaign, which at times felt like a perfect storm for Democrats, even though I'd ultimately be disappointed by their loss of seats in the body that mattered most, the U.S. Senate. Worst of all, there was a dark cloud looming over this summer knowing that my parents would be moving out of my boyhood home by October, so everything I did related to "home" last summer I knew was going to be my last. Grade: C+
As I said at the outset, I can usually feel it in the air at the outset of a great summer. I'm not feeling that going into the summer of 2019 and, being 41 years old now, am not overly confident that the summers moving forward will be overly magical. With my parents' country place (the only place I ever considered home) in the rearview mirror forever, it's not the same going home again. While I can make new memories outside of that rural address, a piece of me was lost forever when they moved 11 miles south into town. Life is full of curveballs and it's possible a summer ahead in my middle-aged years will match or even surpass the halcyon summers of yore, so I won't discount completely that 10 years from now I'll revisit this list and jubilantly relay details of even better summers in the 2020s. I'm not confident of that though.
1983--A-
1984--B+
1985--B
1986--B
1987--B+
1988--A-
1989--B+
1990--A+
1991--A-
1992--B
1993--C+
1994--A
1995--C
1996--F
1997--A
1998--B+
1999--B-
2000--A
2001--A-
2002--C-
2003--B-
2004--B
2005--B+
2006--B+
2007--B+
2008--B-
The top of the pyramid for me remains the summer of 1990, and in general those late 80s and early 90s summers of my formative adolescent years were the most impactful. And there was enough variety in nearly all of these 25 summers that the memories rarely run together. It's interesting how the events of the most recent 10 summers are more likely to run together in my mind than the events of my childhood, but that's largely the way the brain works, and mine in particular.
Obviously the magic of summers from my youth were hard to replicate in my 30s, but I still had plenty of great moments in the previous decade. In one sense I've fallen into a pattern of events to follow most summers, but largely in keeping with activities I enjoy and which define summer for me. Plus I try to mix in a vacation and some other events to give each summer its own unique identity even as I approach middle-age. With that in mind, here are my ratings from the 10 summers since my original writeup a decade ago....
2009--More often than not, I can sense greatness going into a given summer, and I sensed it in 2009. I watched the Minnesota Twins play one last time in Metrodome in their final season there. I had a successful fair season capstoned by a Labor Day weekend do-over for the Minnesota State Fair, where I went to the Great Minnesota Get-Together a second weekend in a row, a tradition I've maintained in the decade after concluding that one visit per year isn't enough. I had a very light load at work that summer and had time to revisit favorite series "The Fall Guy" and "New York Undercover" for the first time in more than a decade. My big August vacation was to Minot, North Dakota, not exactly a tourist mecca but an off-the-beaten-path destination that also led me through the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation and the International Peace Gardens on the Canada-North Dakota border. But most memorable of all in the summer of 2009 was my whirlwind summer romance with a college-aged girl who I really connected with, capstoned with a water park date in northeastern Iowa that remains the gold standard of my summer dating memories. When I wrote the blog post rhapsodizing about great summers 10 years ago this week, I didn't realize I was just about to embark on one of the best. Grade: A-
2010--My two favorite summers of my youth were 1990 and 2000, so if the pattern held, 2010 should have been the next great one. It didn't turn out that way and the summer ended up pretty mediocre. My summer fling from the year before didn't come together for an encore which from the get-go cast a pall on my aspirations. I had one of my most successful summer fair seasons of all-time with concerts by Rosanne Cash and Jo Dee Messina, among others. The fair season generally was the high point of the summer of 2010. My inaugural visit to Target Field, the new stadium of the Minnesota Twins, went okay but it was a cool and damp night that doesn't really hold up as a paragon of summer baseball memories. I had an interesting August vacation to the Wisconsin south shore of Lake Superior and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but I had a sore throat foreshadowing a bad cold on the first day of the vacation so that took some of the wind out of that sail. I could tell the Democrats were poised to take a pounding in the first Obama midterm so it was very hard to get into politics as summer pressed onward. Overall the summer was by no means a disaster but didn't live up to my lofty expectations and fell far short of the summer that preceded it. Grade: B-
2011--Even though little of consequence happened this summer, with more impactful events happening just before and just after summer, I still have a soft spot for it. I revisited the Burnsville Mall, the shopping center that shaped my childhood shopping memories more than any other, that June for the first time in nearly 20 years and, amazingly, it was almost exactly as I remembered it from the late 80s, particularly the "food court" offerings. It was another great fair season involving the county fair I grew up along with two visits each to the Iowa State Fair and the Minnesota State Fair with multiple country and classic rock concerts including the Beach Boys. My big summer vacation that August was a venture to the Badlands and Black Hills. I had gone to the same area in 2008 and had a great time, but there was still enough to see and do that I decided to go back and take on some more pastimes in 2011, including a drive home through the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations. It was also a really hot July with temps hitting 100 degrees in the Upper Midwest on a few occasions, mercifully convincing my folks to get their air conditioning fixed after sweating it out through the summer of 2010 without A/C. It was a time and place I enjoyed even though it was by no means the best summer of my life, and definitely a tick above the summer that preceded it. Grade: B
2012--It's not the case that every summer preceding a Presidential election dominates my time and enthusiasm, but 2012 was certainly a politics-dominated summer in much the way that 2004 was. In both cases, the election was fought on conventional turf defining the governing philosophies of the two parties in their purest forms, and those are the elections that interest me most. Obama vs. Romney fit the bill of that type of election and while I always thought Obama was favored to win, it was no sure thing and it was really fun watching his campaign outmaneuver Romney almost every step of the way. Unfortunately, almost nothing else from the summer of 2012 was particularly memorable. I turned 35 in late August and while that didn't seem like a huge deal at the time, it was a bit of a tipping point in terms of shrinking the dating pool, which had been extremely abundant in my early 30s. The 2012 fair season was decent but unremarkable, the same as could be said about my August vacation to the Teddy Roosevelt National Park in southwestern North Dakota where I was a bit ambitious in how much ground I could cover in a couple of days and still enjoy myself. It was a very dry and hot summer in the Upper Midwest, with several days over 100 degrees and the grass turning brown from lack of precipitation, the most serious drought for the region since the late 1980s. Ultimately though, the excitement of the approaching Presidential election defined the summer and its memories for me, mostly in a good way. Grade: B-
2013--I reconnected with a gal I had dated a few years earlier this summer and while we had high hopes, the lack of chemistry that bedeviled us in 2010 continued to be an obstacle in 2013. That was a disappointment, but we still had a couple of fun dates, particularly when we went to Adventureland amusement park in Des Moines. Luckily for me, there was some other good stuff going on that kept from bringing me down. One of my most epic road trips of all-time was the three-day safari through the central Dakotas and then across the Minnesota-Canadian border and down through the Iron Range home. I went on that original trip in 2003 and felt it overdue for a 10-year revival in 2013. While the weather wasn't as consistently perfect as it was for that flagship trip in 2003, the magic was back in almost every other tangible way and carried me to a very diverse spectrum of landscapes and geographic quirks. I also happened to be in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on the night of the Brown County Fair where I attended and saw country singer Brantley Gilbert perform. Kenny Rogers and Chris Cagle were a couple of the other performers who defined the successful summer fair season. And I also had a great summer TV show to obsess over with NBC's goofy but well-executed multiple personality thriller "Do No Harm", on top of the final season of the long-running summer series "Burn Notice" and a successful launch of the USA Network's interesting "Graceland" series. I wouldn't say that all of my high expectations for the summer were met, but it plugged along better than most in the past decade. Grade: B
2014--This was the least satisfying summer of the last decade for me. I had an issue at work that caused me some problems early in the summer. I had a couple would-be relationships that started red hot but fell apart almost immediately, cratering my self-esteem. And I erred with a solo trip to a water park for nostalgic purposes that ended up just being lonely and depressing. I took my big summer vacation several weeks earlier than usual, right after the 4th of July, and went to the Fox Valley and coastal Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. It wasn't a bad trip by any means but also wasn't one of my favorites. The one unconditionally good development of the summer of 2014 was the short-lived Fox action-drama "Gang Related", far and away my favorite TV series of the past decade even though it went away far too quickly. Beyond that, I had a pretty good fair season in August so the summer ended on a high note, but when I look back at the summers of the past decade, 2014 was the clear low-hanging fruit of the bunch. Grade: C-
2015--While I remember 2014 mostly for its disappointments, 2015 is a summer I really don't remember that well at all and where so many of my memories run together with other years. Summer got off to a late start as the Iowa Legislature for whom I work didn't adjourn until the first week of June, several weeks behind schedule. There were no defining TV shows or fun side trips from the summer and I was disengaged from the dating scene. I wrapped the summer up with a memorable trip to the Ozarks and eastern Plains, and also test-drove a new entry in my summer fair tour, going to Sedalia, Missouri, for that state's fair for the first time and enjoyed it, redneck culture shock and all. The quality fair season and that Ozarks vacation stand out as the only genuinely memorable moments of the summer for me though. Grade: C+
2016--Another summer that wasn't fantastic but had a few more memorable moments than the one that preceded it. Just before summer started I had a memorable stint on jury duty that was more fun than I anticipated. Beyond that, I visited a couple of friends out of state and took an epic August road trip to the Mississippi River Delta of the Upper South in states like Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Missouri bootheel, and southern Illinois. I also attended my 20-year high school class reunion, which I had mixed feelings about but mostly positive as I have favorable associations with high school and my former classmates. The summer fair season was okay but not one of my favorites, nor was the Presidential campaign season of 2016. Obviously, whenever you're talking about a Presidential election year, I had an above-average level of buzz about politics, but I didn't like either candidate or the general direction of politics in America. My apprehension was more than justified based on the election's eventual outcome, but as of the summer of 2016, I was still pretty convinced that Donald Trump was never gonna be elected President. Grade: B-
2017--Now we're talking! At least for the first half of the summer of 2017, I was happily in a relationship that was ongoing from spring, and I had a flurry of great memories from that relationship including the best 4th of July of my life. Unfortunately it ended by midsummer, but even after that I had an oddball fling with a neighbor's friend in the closing weeks of summer. It was the last summer of my 30s and went out with a bang with a successful fair season that softened the blow of my 40th birthday in late August. My late summer vacation was to the eastern Midwest where I explored Indiana and western Ohio. While it wasn't the most thrilling of my vacations, it was an area I hadn't been to since I was a small child and I checked off another state fair from my list when I went to the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis. It's a big and impressive state fair, although I wasn't thrilled with the layout, where the grounds encircles a gigantic racetrack. Usually my summers are backloaded with most of the good times coming in August, but this was a summer that had exciting moments and great memories from beginning to end. It was certainly sad when the relationship fell apart by mid-July though and that keeps this summer from being as satisfying as 2009, but it was easily my second-best summer of the last 10 years. Grade: B+
2018--Mediocrity. The awesomeness of the preceding summer made 2018 seem all the more pale by comparison. There was nothing specifically wrong with it and I was lucky to thread a needle with my fair visits as it seemed to be rainy every day before and after my tours of the Freeborn County, Iowa State, and Minnesota State Fairs, along with a return visit to the Missouri State Fair, but it was dry the day of each respective fair. My August trip was to the Rocky Mountain foothills in Colorado and the Nebraska Sandhills. I generally enjoyed it but find the blandness of Kansas and especially Nebraska were a pretty high price to pay to visit Colorado, and it doesn't help that my long-standing streak of negative associations in Nebraska continued with a fumbled attempt to visit the Capitol building in Lincoln along with a messy hourlong traffic jam on the freeway near Omaha that I found myself trapped in after a very long time in the car driving from Denver toward Des Moines. I was engaged in the election midterm campaign, which at times felt like a perfect storm for Democrats, even though I'd ultimately be disappointed by their loss of seats in the body that mattered most, the U.S. Senate. Worst of all, there was a dark cloud looming over this summer knowing that my parents would be moving out of my boyhood home by October, so everything I did related to "home" last summer I knew was going to be my last. Grade: C+
As I said at the outset, I can usually feel it in the air at the outset of a great summer. I'm not feeling that going into the summer of 2019 and, being 41 years old now, am not overly confident that the summers moving forward will be overly magical. With my parents' country place (the only place I ever considered home) in the rearview mirror forever, it's not the same going home again. While I can make new memories outside of that rural address, a piece of me was lost forever when they moved 11 miles south into town. Life is full of curveballs and it's possible a summer ahead in my middle-aged years will match or even surpass the halcyon summers of yore, so I won't discount completely that 10 years from now I'll revisit this list and jubilantly relay details of even better summers in the 2020s. I'm not confident of that though.
posted by Mark at 6:59 PM
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My recent summers when they didn't involve work, like in 2009, 2011, and 2012 - 2016, involved gardening in botanic and community gardens, as well as a lot of travel.
Since moving to Utah, only a few hours from many national parks, I have traveled more often, to the parks as well as other places. I have seen the Grand Canyon north and south rims, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Yellowstone. I also visited Portland Oregon as well as Ravenna Nebraska for the eclipse. A month after the eclipse I went on a 2-week tour of California with my father-in-law, from San Francisco to L.A., including Yosemite.
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