Summer, the last golden age

W hen the hot weather rolls around, a common complaint heard over many years is the lack of summer activities for young people here in town.

Most of us are familiar with our latest generation of "park rats" socializing on the benches of Basin Spring Park -- some of us were those same park rats, in our day -- and yet when I look around I see not only Eureka Kids hard at work, but also the Eureka Springs School of the Arts (ESSA), Main Stage offering Shakespeare workshops, the G.R.E.A.T. program, and all the local artists and musicians who give lessons to local youth.

I'll bet the people who best make use of those activities are the same people who use them every year -- those who are committed to finding the best possible resources for their children, despite it taking extra time and money to find these opportunities, and who are in a position to be able to devote time and money to that end.

Of course, that leaves those of us who are struggling daily just to feed our children, working schedules that leave us without that extra time or money to give our children the golden summers we would like them to have.

Behind everything I've said so far, however, is a larger philosophical problem, one I may sound naive or out-of-touch voicing.

When I was a kid, my summers consisted of wandering around with my dog and pellet gun, shooting frogs with which I'd then terrify my little sister. Or hanging out with my grandparents. Or, because I was a bookworm, spending long hours under a tree somewhere reading comic books or The Hobbit or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I question the modern necessity of filling every spare moment of our children's existence with scheduled activities, all designed to improve their little pink brains.

I'm not sure why it bothers me, or if I'm even right to complain. Would it be better to plant them in front of the television, to let them be sucked dry by our greedy, consumer-driven media culture?

Or should we simply let them wander loose, to get pregnant or hooked on dope hanging out with their buddies and no adult supervision?

I doubt it. I always took my idyllic childhood for granted, and now it seems impossibly Tom Sawyer-esque to me, even considering it happened 30 years ago.

What chance do our kids have to wander empty creek beds, imagining themselves pirates or astronauts, shooting frogs or burying treasure to be dug up later as proof of the ongoing life of the young imagination?

It may simply be the golden age I remember never really existed, except for the lucky few, of which I was one without realizing it -- though I suspect my parents had that kind of thing in mind, raising me and my sister in the country.

And I cannot imagine myself sans my early consumption of mass culture through those never-ending summers, not even when I begged my mom to let me watch "Dark Shadows" and then couldn't go to sleep without the lights on.

We are all creatures of our culture, and I for one have no regrets.

In the meantime, do your best. Take your kids to the river or fishing or whatever you can manage. If you spend time with them enjoying your lives together, you will have given them their own endless golden summers, even if it isn't what you'd do if you had the money.

It isn't always about the money.

-- Don Lee