The Summer Project: The Last Pure Summer (1982)

Most everybody's childhood reaches a place where the nature of their true selves begins to fundamentally change. It's not just growing up, but becoming more self-aware, more attuned the world around yourself, and more sophisticated in how you think. This doesn't happen overnight, but essentially, you begin the transition from child to the first vestiges of your adult existence. And I don't think you realize it's happening until years later when you look back and realize, "Wow, things really changed when I was X years old."

This transition started for me around fourth grade. My recollections often are divided between before  and after the fall I started that grade. Part of it was maybe that in fourth grade, we started switching classes for the first time in school, and it felt so advanced. I was still a dorky little kid, and perhaps the turn of the decade offered a clearer delineation, but something about that year was different ... and it never went back.

The debut issue of Video Games
magazine, which I bought at Jewel
in June 1982 and then subscribed
to for its entire brief run over the
next two years.

Again, the transition isn't instantaneous -- the development toward
adult takes a long time. But in my years of treasured summers, there are a few in between fourth grade and the really next big leap in my brain that are particularly special. In 1982, I was still a little kid -- albeit, hurtling toward teenager-hood and leaving single digits far behind -- and possessed much of the innocence and wonder that are inherent to little kids. In short, summer 1982 was the last pure summer. Consider:

• I was still playing baseball. It was my last year, and it was a mess (I need to write about that at some point), but it was memorable nonetheless.
• I knew little about sex. Once you cross over into that knowledge, nothing is the same.
• I didn't know how perilously perched the world was to a nuclear war. I'm really not sure how I avoided this knowledge that, once I figured it out, would haunt me some nights.
• I was a ridiculously enthusiastic video gamer. That summer, I played Chopper Command, Starmaster, Defender, and Berserk on my Atari; and Dig Dug, Robotron, Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, Kangaroo, and Tron in the arcades.
• I saw "E.T." and "Tron" -- two movies that played into my kidly wonder.
• This was the last summer I remember my parents being mostly happy. I know there might have been more stuff going on behind the scenes they kept from us, but my memories from this time are of the good.
• I didn't have a job yet.
• I watched MTV for the first time.

Within a year of this summer, I pretty much knew about sex, knew how crappy the world can be, stopped playing baseball, had a paper route, and started to feel that inevitable adolescent self-doubt. The video game industry crashed. Music changed -- maybe for the better, but those nascent days of music video and that uniquely post-disco pop disappeared. School got harder, and I started thinking about the future -- my future.

Summers were still great after 1982 but not quite as amazing or carefree as they used to be. They felt shorter, more uncertain, and loaded with more requirements and responsibilities.

The summer wasn't perfect. I was beaned in the arm with a pitch that hurt all summer, made me miss half of my games and flake out on a basketball camp, and cause a lot of stress between my father and me. I still couldn't swim, and it was torturing me more that I couldn't overcome my fear. My friend George spoiled "Rocky III" for me.

But summer 1982 was still pretty awesome. I didn't have another one so rockin' until 1988, before I left for college (interestingly, another transition). What's humbling 37 years later is that my sons likely passed their last pure summers, too. The season may not change, but what we bring to it does.