BRINGING UP MOMMY COLUMN
BY DEBRA-LYNN B. HOOK
PUBLISHED BY MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
JULY 2010
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THE SUMMER OF PICKLES
My 13-year-old spends his summer days hanging with a gang we call The Pickle Boys.
It's not a gang in the street sense of the word.
Think instead Spanky and Alfalfa.
Think freckles and braces and five 12- and 13-year-old boys who have been best friends since pre-school. Think long, hot days in a cool, black lake. Think Four Square and Frisbee and Pickle in the Middle, a keep-away game they play so much that one parent borrowed the name and gave it to them. Think World Cup parties evolving into burgers and watermelon, evolving into S'mores and sleepovers, and when the order has been given for lights off, the sound of boys' muffled laughter and chatter into the night from tents in the back yard or from the basement where they've lain their sleeping bags side-by-side.
The Pickle Boys are not without their modern distractions. Like millions of other American boys, they have their DSs, their Wiis, their PlayStations and their iPods, from which they have to be pulled away.
But together, they are bigger than their gadgets. In a culture of organized activities and a constant struggle against summer boredom, the Pickle Boys are their own organization, like the neighborhood gangs of eras gone by, especially apparent during the easy, accessible days of summer when it's just as simple for five to hang out, as it is for two or three or four.
The beauty of the Pickle Boys lies in this collective loyalty and in a shared joie de vivre, captured in endless afternoons of driveway basketball and pickup soccer, captured in a summer snapshot during a safety break at the pool one afternoon, their chests bare while they laugh over a book that in later years might very well be a centerfold in Playboy, but this summer is the "The Ultimate List of Top Ten Lists" and the Top Ten Poisonous Foods We Love to Eat.
It lies in chronology. Old enough this summer finally - to walk the several blocks to each other's houses, they are yet young enough that a simple game of Pickle in the Middle is enough to sustain and entertain.
It lies in longevity. They've known each other since they were 3, riding the halls of Tree City Preschool on three-wheelers.
We parents look on gratefully, knowing what we have here. Not geeks or nerds, not artsy or jocks, not yet flirty with the girls or snippy with their mothers, here is a gang of boys whose parents stayed in the same place long enough for five boys' shared interests and temperaments to bond together in friendships that have carried them almost as long as their families, through all of pre-school and elementary school, into the notoriously fractious years of middle school.
We also know the summer before eighth grade doesn't last forever. Next summer is the summer before high school. Someone will go into summer sports training. Somebody will get a girlfriend. Paths will change. Other interests will form.
But for now, the ones among the Pickle Boys who have braces tell the orthodontist, "Lime green bands, please," because of a pact they made to keep the same color on their teeth.
They rise in the morning, wondering what they will do today. They go to bed at night, often next to one another under twinkly lights strung up in the basement.
These days will change one day; we don't know how.
For right now, right here, in a small town in northeast Ohio, this is a summer where memories are being made. They are memories for us, too, one gracious summer of watermelon and sleepovers, of laughter and simple pleasure and a gang we called the Pickle Boys.
