Summer in the City

Summer in the City — page 1 — To our friends and neighbors in Montreal

Summer in the City — page 2 — The stay-cation Help My brain is melting It’s as hot as an oven in here even if all the windows in my classroom are open Outside the birds are singing and the insects are droning on and on Exactly like Mrs Billington She’s my teacher who uses chalk for make-up and always has this fierce bug-eyed look on her face

Summer in the City — page 3 — Especially when she starts talking about the importance of preparing for final exams Like right now I want all of you to review Revise Make a List of Your Priorities She’s waving her arms around like a windmill and her red face is streaked with chalk She takes a deep breath as if she’s about to say something incredibly important THE RESULTS OF THESE EXAMS WILL DECIDE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE That’s enough to melt anybody’s brain Adults are so weird I’m finishing sixth grade and I’m supposed to think about the rest of my life I just want to get out of here so I can play baseball The rest of my life can wait My mother’s always asking me in her casual I’m-not really-asking-you kind of way what I want to do when I get older As if I didn’t know she wants me to say I want to be an artist just like you But if I said that the next minute I’d be enrolled in Saturday morning art classes like it or not Or if I answered I’d like to be a doctor I’d end up in

Summer in the City — page 4 — young scientists camp before I could say Open heart surgery No the rest of my life can wait until after summer vacation That gets me thinking I wonder where we’ll be going this summer You see whether I want to or not year after year vacation after vacation my parents bundle us into a car or a plane and off we go to some out-of-the-way place Ever been caught in a revolution in Mexico with kids not much older than you pointing rusty old guns in your direction I have Ever been chased by raging bulls around a square in some tiny village in the south of France Tell me about it If we’re not riding out hurricanes on the coast we’re getting sandblasted in the desert Or coming face to face with hungry alligators in the middle of a swamp in the middle of nowhere Those are the kinds of vacations we have No lazing around on the beach No Disneyland Our specialty is roughing it in some faraway place If I had the choice which I never do I’d have a normal kind of vacation in a

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