By Thomas Winterhoff
First published on August 21, 2002.
Copyright © Thomas Winterhoff
If ever there were a season where people are inclined to leave their brain at the door, summer is the one. It’s usually during these long, sunny days that normally intelligent people will do the darnedest things – activities and stunts and they wouldn’t even think of attempting in any other season – that often result in one form of embarrassing injury or another.
July and August are prime temporal destinations on the space-time continuum to Stupidville. Witnessing all the self-induced, real-life summer bloopers that come along every year at this time is kind of like watching America’s Funniest Home Videos with the VCR stuck on fast forward.
Rarely does a week go by in which somebody (usually hailing from towns like Deadbolt, Arkansas or Buttfuzz, South Carolina) doesn’t complete a triple half-pike with a twist into the bottom of a very deep well. As a lively alternative to that favourite standby, the town’s proud denizens may choose to get all liquored up on corn whiskey and fall into a campfire.
Despite decades of well-documented mayhem and bodily injury on the streets of Pamplona, Spain, testosterone-inflamed young men line up every year – agog with eager anticipation – to match their wits against bulls that outweigh them by a factor of about 10-1. After the lads imbibe a few flagons of the region’s infamously potent wine, the bulls’ collective mental edge is about the same.
But I’m certainly no innocent in all of this. I took full advantage of the opportunity to be stupid almost every summer of my life up to the age of 18 – and it don’t never done did me no harm.
I remember getting together with friends when I was a young lad and quite happily doing everything possible to inflict serious injury to ourselves.
A prime example (which ably demonstrates that we were not the sharpest crayons in the box) was the time that we lay down on our backs under a brilliant blue Prairie sky and took turns shooting arrows high into the air above us.
The whole purpose of the exercise was to see if our aim was true enough to have the finely honed missiles plunge straight back down and pierce our admittedly empty skulls. We never actually accomplished that lofty goal, but we certainly tried our best.
A newsroom colleague of mine relates a similar tale. He and his friends would clamber aboard a playground merry-go-round, crank it up to ramming speed and then lay themselves down on the deck so that their faces were hanging mere millimetres above the coarse gravel whizzing by below.
They would then attempt to pick up marbles that had been strategically placed around the perimeter of the rapidly spinning deathtrap with their teeth.
Despite the inherent dangers of letting today’s youngsters pursue the same course of self-destructive behaviour, I’m afraid we’ve already let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. Nowadays, it would seem, kids rarely have time anymore just to let loose, have some mindless fun and be themselves.
All too often, parents enroll them in "fun" educational activities from the moment the final school bell rings in June to the day they wearily trudge back into the classroom in September.
I swear that I’ve seen three-year-old toddlers running around with Day-Timers and cell phones tucked inside their Pamper’s Pull-ups, just so that they can keep track of all their summer commitments.
Between soccer camps, nature craft fairs, visits to dull-as-dishwater museums, summer reading clubs and learning about the wonderful intricacies of compost maintenance, kids are losing their ability to enjoy the incomparable sensation of doing absolutely nothing for weeks at a time.
At the very least, these stressed-out children are being denied the pleasure of discovering their own brand of fun in the sun and the simple pleasures of a seemingly endless summer afternoon. I suspect we could raise a whole new generation of imaginative, spontaneous children if we would only let them find their own ways of entertaining themselves.
But you might want to lock up all your bows and arrows in an out-of-the-way cupboard – just in case.
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