Summer Experiences

I wrote this when I was ten, for school, with the title above.

This summer was probably the best in my life.

Before school let out, a Chicano came to our school to talk to us. He was Desi Ortez, and the one person who really listened was Laura S. She started picketing A&P. After a while, I joined her.

For most of the summer, I complained (just to Laura) and didn’t come to the pickets. I was lazy. Working for the boycott I met a lot of wonderful people. Like David Martinez. He called my mother and persuaded her to let me go to a boycott party.

His one passion was volleyball. I play absolutely rottenly. So at the first game, I missed a ball and everybody groaned, then somebody said “That’s all right, Linda.” One thing I did get good at was serving. Once I made 7 points in a row serving.

Another person was Alfonso, commonly called Poncho. He seemed to me to be a compact person. One of his roommates was Ruben, who at first seemed to be all right, but turned out to be prejudeced (?). He hated whites, and lectured Laura (about different things).

One especially good part of the summer was the Cesar [Chavez] rally. I loved it. Afterward at the rally, I met Cesar and talked to him. There were many other people, and I’ll never forget them.

Late in August we went to our cottage. We didn’t do much else except sail. I met one of my distant cousins.

My mom has a dream of sailing around the world. Maybe we will.

(End of piece. My teacher wrote “Very Nice!” on it.)

I remember picketing outside A&P, around and around in a circle. One day I thought it would be clever to poke plastic bags stacked up outside the store with a small sharp metal pointy thing; the bags contained grass seed or dirt or something. The manager came out to ask me to stop, which of course I did. It was embarrassing.

I was a young activist. A few years prior, I helped dig a bomb crater to protest the Vietnam war and appeared in a photo in the Ann Arbor News.

Laura S., at 11, was very voluptuous for her age, and was having sex with some of those grown men. About that time, and very much having to do with Laura S.’s precocious sex life, I adopted a protective manner of dressing, in overalls, work boots, ancient sweatshirts, and a leather editor’s visor that I loved.

I myself had a crush on David Martinez, but he always behaved like a perfect gentleman. No harm came to me that summer, if you omit the fact that it was with Laura that I started smoking marijuana. She had three older brothers, Todd, Rick and Kim, who had taken over the family’s attic. I remember being up there smoking pot, which gave me a buttery feeling in my throat.

Not long ago, my mother sent me Todd’s obituary. He was closest in age to me and Laura. I don’t know what he died of.

"Sail" and "cottage" shouldn't make you think we were rich; they should make you think of a small Styrofoam craft eight or ten feet long, and a little place on Little Traverse Bay in northern Michigan that was formerly a garage. It had one main room where my parents' beds were, along with the dining table and big green chair, plus a small kitchen, bedroom for the kids, and bathroom.

You could walk to the water in one minute, through a tangle of poison ivy. The beach was all smooth rocks, no sand. Now and then one might wet a stone and thus discover it to be a Petoskey stone, with its distinctive round markings, very beautiful when polished. I liked to sit on a large inflated rubber innertube in the water.

All those people I was sure I would never forget, I can't remember any of them.