Summertime Blues

 

Well, I’m gonna raise a fuss, I’m gonna raise a holler,

About workin’ all summer just to try to earn a dollar,

Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do,

‘Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.* 

Remember those lazy summer days of our youth? No school and nothing to do but have fun for almost three months. Riding bikes all morning, retreating to the cool shade of the woods as the summer heat began to build, and playing hide and seek under the streetlights as darkness fell, until our parents called us in.

“You better get those chores done before you go off galivanting in the woods!” 

Oh, yeah. Summer chores. I remember them well from my boyhood in the 1950s and ‘60s.

My parents were children of the Great Depression. They bought a quarter acre in the suburbs south of Pittsburgh. My grandmother insisted that they put it to good use. That meant planting a big garden, putting in some fruit trees and buying some livestock to feed a growing family. The livestock, which consisted of chickens, rabbits and a duck, didn’t last. My father didn’t have the heart to do what had to be done to make dinners out of them.

On the other hand, our neighbor, who had 10 kids to feed, raised a menagerie of farm animals on their quarter acre lot. Those kids had to feed the ducks and chickens and gather their eggs. They had a nanny goat that had to be milked and a pack of “huntin’ dogs” – beagles, that had to be fed and watered every day.

My brothers and I didn’t have animals to feed, but there was always work to do in the garden. The tomato plants had to be watered virtually every day unless it rained. My father insisted they needed lots of water, delivered by watering can. A hose just wouldn’t do the job right in his opinion. My father knew that on those rare occasions when he allowed us to use the hose, my brothers and I would end up soaking each other rather than the tomato plants.

Another garden chore involved “dusting the beans.” My father punched holes in the lid of a mason jar and filled it with lime, which had to be shaken onto each plant to discourage rabbits from snacking on the leaves. Besides green beans and tomatoes, my father grew radishes, parsley, carrots, cucumbers, green peppers, and corn. One time, my mother sent me to the garden to gather some parsley. She was a little miffed when I returned with a bunch of carrot tops.

The chores didn’t stop when it came time to harvest. My parents canned more tomatoes than we ate fresh, so we’d spend hours sitting on the back porch struggling to peel the skin off the ripe, red fruit. My parents also canned green beans, so we’d be back on that porch cutting off the stems and tips and slicing the beans into bite-sized pieces.

We had two sour cherry trees; their fruit was best suited for cherry pies. After picking the ripe cherries, we would be back on that porch, cutting out the seeds while trying not to slice a finger. Destoning the cherries got a little easier and safer when my father heard that if you pulled the eraser out of a pencil and pushed it through the cherry, the pit would pop out.

There were a few chores for which my parents were willing to pay. For example, I earned a nickel for every half hour that I pushed my baby brother in the stroller. I was young and naïve enough to think I could get rich at that rate. As we got older, my father would pay us a dollar to wash his car. But he never thought to pay us to cut the grass on the large, hilly portion of our yard. On a hot, summer’s day, that was hard work!

As summer came to a close and school began, we looked forward to Saturdays.

“Those apples are getting ripe. You boys need to start picking,” my father would say.

So, my older brother and I would climb our massive tree, pick the apples and toss them down to our younger brothers to catch and put in buckets. We had to be careful because the yellow jackets liked those ripe apples as much as we did. My parents made applesauce out of most of them, canning the sauce in mason jars.

By the end of the summer, we were looking forward to returning to school. But while those chores often seemed to get in the way of our summertime fun, they also produced some great memories. And maybe, just maybe, they were the cure for our summertime blues.

 

*Eddie Cochran, Jerry Neal Capehart, 1958.

I'm Your Handy Man

 

Hey girls, gather round,

Listen to what I’m puttin’ down,

Hey baby, I’m your handy man*

 

I worked as a lawyer for thirty years and have been writing for the past ten. So, why do I feel I also have to be handy around the house?

I might blame my father – a child of the Great Depression, a World War II veteran, and a steelworker. But after giving it some thought, I couldn’t remember him tackling many do-it-yourself projects. Usually, he would call a neighbor who had some skills. For bigger projects, he would bring in a contractor. I do remember him trying to fix a leaky water pipe, more for the swear words I learned than for his plumbing expertise. The one project he seemed to enjoy was his backyard vegetable garden. But the pleasure he got out of it may have been that it helped reduce the cost of feeding five growing boys. I recall that he abandoned the garden not long after his boys grew up and moved out.

Besides what I picked up from my father, I learned a few more handy man skills from my junior high shop classes. Since becoming a homeowner, I have put those skills to use with varying degrees of success. In my first house, I designed and built a utility table that I am still using forty years later. I installed a fluorescent light fixture in our next home and successfully replaced a leaky water line valve without near the number of expletives my father reserved for plumbing jobs. I even replaced a hot water tank at a friend’s house once upon a time.

On the other hand, I nearly wrecked our car while performing a do-it-yourself oil change when I failed to block the tires and the parking brake let loose. Sheer luck and a skillful tow truck operator prevented that project from being a complete disaster. Then there was the time I adjusted some valves on our hot water heating system. I didn’t correct the problem I was trying to fix, so I ended up calling a plumber anyway. He told me my adjustments could have caused our boiler to blast off like a rocket. His advice to me?

“You’re a lawyer, I’m a plumber. I won’t try to do your job, and please don’t try to do mine.”

My late father-in-law put it even better. “The shoemaker’s children have to eat, too.”

That’s true for any type of project that requires some professional expertise. I recently called a contractor when the towel rack in our bathroom fell after a previous attempt on my part to do-it-myself. Now the towel rack is solidly on the wall without fear that a wet towel will cause its downfall. And the damaged drywall has been perfectly restored.

Sure, there are a few jobs around the house for which I would be embarrassed to call a contractor, such as hanging a picture. But the number of those jobs continues to decrease as I get older and, perhaps, wiser. Maybe, I’ve finally come to the realization that I’m not your handy man. 

 

*Written by Jimmy Jones and Otis Blackwell, 1959