Jun. 12, 2007 - 19:40 MDT

ONE SUMMER

I was about sixteen years old when summer vacation from school happened to me. Delicious it was.

I had obtained work at a diary that had a store on the street. I worked the counter, dishing ice cream, cottage cheese or whatever, jugs of milk and all that.

The work was easy and making change no problem to me. One thing I did learn was to place the bill I was given on the little shelf above the cash drawer, in plain sight until change was given and accepted as right, then placed in the drawer before shutting.

This was about the time that cheap paperback books came in to my life. Not magazines, as I already was hooked on Astounding Stories in a sci-fi mag. But reprints of books already published in hardcovers.

Opened a whole new world for me. Over the summer I read about two books a night and still made it to work bright eyed ready to go. It was so hard for me to put a book down before it was read through, still is as well.

I had free run on dairy products there and would often have a dish of French Vanilla Ice Cream on the side, taking a bite now and then. But my favorite food there was their cottage cheese. I'd dish up some, pour cream on it and salt it nicely. Makes me hunger for it just thinking about it.

I gained weight that summer, but not as much as one would expect, guess I worked hard ? I can't remember all the books I read that time, one was about the Magic Bullet dealing with the perfection of a drug to combat syphilis, one was about building the Panama Canal and the battle against Malaria. And of course, many thrillers, murder mysteries et al. Seems to me that I first encountered Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe that summer.

Then after a blessed summer it was back to school and the drudgery of a geometry teacher who would take the whole hour talking about clairvoyance, but would give a geometry test every Friday and such things as that.

It had been a summer that eased my move from South Denver to East Denver. I missed my friends from there but none of us really had the money for carfare normally. While I worked that summer I had the money but not the time to go visit. My nights were spent reading and adventuring in my imagination, so a lack of new friends was not so hard. Then when school started in September I did make a few friends. But my beloved memory is that ONE SUMMER . . . . . . . . .

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