It was once explained to me why Atlanta and the areas surrounding had such erratic weather. Well, all I can really recall is it has something to do with being near the Gulf of Mexico and blah blah blah. You can quote me on that. What brought this to mind is the most erratic June and July I've experienced as a resident of Georgia. Almost everyday starts somewhat optimistically: blue skies, clouds, birds, and the sort. But 5 out of 7 days devolve into some seriously dark clouds, thunder, lightning, and pelting rain. For context, Georgians are accustomed to one, maybe two weeks of spring weather with nice temperatures in the low 80's, lots of showers, and mild evenings. Our summers are supposed to threaten us with drought and and be in the high 90's.

It got me thinking about some summer weather I really didn't enjoy at one point in my life. For two summers I worked at a church in The Woodlands, Texas, a suburb of Houston. I worked with the high school youth group and loved it. Trips to Sonic were part of my job, swimming in pools (because every kid seemed to have a pool) happened almost daily, and trips to the boardwalk or Chipotle were commonplace. But the weather...

Houston is like inland Florida. It's that area where it starts to smell not like sea breezes, but rather just sulfur. It's flat and the greenery has a bright, chameleon tint to it that hits your eyes and manages to make you wonder why sleeveless shirts are so suffocating. Houston and the surrounding metropolitan area actually manage to get hotter after the sun goes down. Someone explained it to me as something to do with the concrete, lack or trees, and of course blah blah blah. If I walked from an air conditioned building outside at any point of the day while I was wearing my glasses, they would get a creeping fog rendering me blind for a strict minimum of 15 seconds. 

In the long run, I could manage all of this heat and humidity. I'd grown up with it on a lesser scale in Georgia, but there was one part I wasn't aware I would miss: nights. Nights in my childhood memory and today as I live in Atlanta are a sweet reprieve from the daytime. Nights here allow every bit of the earth that's been baking all day to become fragrant in a cool evening. Not to sound too much like some lost prose from Gone with the Wind, but I found myself missing magnolias all wilted and sugary from a day of sun smelling like an old lost perfume, and honeysuckle and grass mixing together in one of those glorious scents that you can taste when you breathe. 

And the sounds. Crickets and cicadas and frogs creating a soothing dull drone. Without them in Houston, night time jogs become a creepy experience where every dog is suddenly the likely beginning of a real-life horror movie. All of this coupled with a hilly damp that you feel when driving in the low points over creeks and riverbeds with your windows down has a sense of justice that makes the sunny days of Georgia so worth it. 

This all my seem like splitting hairs. After all, it's just one season in one part of the country. But watching kids stay inside all summer due to legitimate health concerns from extreme temperatures got me down. None of the children I worked with or those of the family I lived with ever ran barefoot outside trying to toughen up their "Indian Feet." Slight racial slurs aside, I find myself being thankful for my loud, sweet, and restful summer nights where windows were flung open and grass would turn soothingly damp under my feet. I'll always see houses lit up with fans spinning inside, a cold fridge of kool-aid made by mine or a neighbor's mom. 

Don't mess with Texas. It's just too damn hot. 

Where have you gone to, Jenny McCarthy?

For as long as I can remember, my entire paternal family took trips to St. Augustine, Florida every year for a Fourth of July beach trip. It's a classic beach destination sort of place. Pink stucco buildings with red Spanish roofs surrounding a beautiful little kidney shaped swimming pool. There is a boardwalk almost the length of a football field down to the beach that has a door with a keycard that, to my knowledge, has not been updated since before the Soviet Union dissolved. Most of the units resemble the set of the Golden Girls. For the past few years, we went to Tybee Island, Georgia instead, but this year we went back to St. Augustine.

My first day there, sitting under umbrellas telling my Aunt Nora Anne about my underwhelming new job in recruiting, I noticed a man walking by. He had a familiar gait and even a goatee that reminded me of a friend. He even had a poor posture that I know so well because I do the same thing. It's a hips jutted out, head slightly forward thing. It's not terrible, really. You'd have to look pretty hard and then you might just think we were slightly scoliotic. I walked over to where this possible friend was playing with kids that possibly looked a lot like his. Sure enough, it was my former boss and current friend, Clay.

It's a strange thing running into home friends on a vacation. Worlds collide and it completely expels the mindset of escape you've been working on for the seven hour drive down. It's great though, wonderful material for bragging to all the other friends you two share.

Clay and Deborah were there with their three kids as well as her side of the family. They were like the Andersons circa 1987, also known as lots of family and all the kids under the age of 10. I talked with Clay and watched their kids play in the tide pools that form on the incredibly wide beach of St. Augustine. He said the kids play hard all day and fall fast asleep at night, open-mouthed draining the air of the bedrooms for all available oxygen in the way that only exasperated and content children can. In the evenings, the family grandfather watches the kids while the parents do the fun kind of stuff you do at the beach before you procreated.

In talking with Clay and Deborah and seeing the similarities between a young group and where I at 25 am the baby of the family, I realized there are some universal truths of family vacations. Everyone has their roles. Dads are in charge of making sure the kids don't drown, the teaching of boogey boarding, and being clinched to tightly by children terrified of crashing waves. Moms are for the other side of the day, the tent/umbrella world more back towards the dunes. Calories and hydration prevent crankiness, and regular/miserable reapplication of sunscreen to avoid subsequent reapplications of aloe. Moms also keep the running list of things to do when you're tired of getting your sinuses flushed out by saltwater knocking you over: walks, sandcastles, paddle ball, the like.

I also realized with talking with my friends that vacations are a terrible amount of work for the parents. All of the aforementioned tasks are terribly draining and not really what you'd prefer to do. Young parents must especially remember their younger days of beer coolers, overly-competitive volleyball games, and laying out. Maybe they even appeared on screen of MTV's spring break for six seconds of VHS-at-your-mom's-house glory. Now their coolers have Goldfish and Capri Suns. They play games like "dad watch me not be very good at body surfing." And of course, they probably would rather just wear a shirt  and wide brimmed hat on the beach to avoid burning and prevent premature aging. How quickly things change and how badly tribal tattoos fade. While my cousins and I make trips to the "World Famous Oasis Deck and Restaurant," they watch kids videos on iPads. It's not bad, it's just where you are in life.

Earlier I said that I was the youngest of my family, but actually my cousin and his wife now have two boys, 3 and 1 years old. Twenty-two years later and I'm not the cute one, although arguably cute was out of the question by the gawky age of 11. The great thing about these boys is remembering how well my family makes children feel special. They all have this untaught ability to listen to kids and remind them through their actions and words that their little thoughts are big to them, important even. We all sing them happy birthday and do that weird thing of repeating everything they say right after they say it, just to re-live the cute. It is actually quite delightful to participate in making things special for kids.

So it seems there are two options to kids at the beach. Bring grandparents like my friends, or just be incredibly stealthy and drinking copious amounts of beer in front of your kids like my family. Either way, it's always fun, and who knows, you might run in to an old friend to talk to.

Elkin Highway

To this day, I love stories about my father’s childhood. He grew up under his father’s grocery store in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. It was a small, home-looking building on the corner of a rural highway and a country road. My dad and his two brothers, sister, mother and daddy all lived underneath in a house that my Mema kept “neat as a pin.” Up the road was the Old Place, a modest farmhouse set amongst rolling hills with the obligatory red barn topped by a shiny tin roof. That’s where his father grew up smack dab in the middle of 24 Anderson kids. To go ahead and answer all your questions, my great-grandfather had two wives, the first one had 12 and died, the second one had 12 and lived. My Pepa was the oldest in the second set.

                

Next to the Old Place was Liberty Grove Baptist Church. A small, unified little congregation, my dad and his siblings worshipped, ate potlucks, snuck off with teenage significant others during vacation Bible school for some harmless, yet decidedly impious activities. The church offered some sort of social interaction in an extremely rural, and even for its time, disconnected little town.

It’s not too much of a stereotype to attribute some classic North Carolina and Appalachia features to North Wilkesboro. NASCAR star Junior Johnson was known to sit on the front porch and drink a Pepsi. Most everyone smoked or chewed tobacco. Moonshiners abounded, and it is moonshiners that one of my father’s favorite recollections comes from.

There were a group of them, about three I think the story goes. These people were a testament to alcoholism. A true health class warning video if there ever was one against the evils of drink. So there were three of them and they were known to sit in a house down by the river (cue Chris Farley) and simply drink. They drank all the time. They made ‘shine, they sold it, and they drank it. That tangy stink of a subway station hobo doesn’t touch the cloud that surrounded these people. The moonshiners all had a visible scariness to them, the dead expression and borderline uncontrolled mannerisms of the truly inebriated. One in particular had a mangled stub of an arm because he stuck his arm out the window of a car (while drunk of course) and had a surprise amputation courtesy of a stop sign.

So there they were one summer day bumbling around the store. My Pepa, Earl, had a fantastic patience with most people, probably borne of his time with his own sometimes foolish clan of unending siblings. Well today, they were being less than cooperative and were also cussing up a storm. Pepa had no patience for swearing, especially with his kids all under the age of 12 in the store. He told the drunks to stop or get out, and to everyone’s surprise, they didn’t cooperate. He told them again to stop or leave, and they very eloquently expressed their firm belief that they shouldn’t.  At this point, the four small Anderson kids were sent downstairs to the house. Of course they dutifully left, but only reached the top of the stairs behind a semi-closed door. Finally, my Pepa physically threw them out. And that was that.

Of course it wasn’t. Babe came in and told them that one of them had a knife and was fixing to come back in. Babe is the obligatory old man who sits on country store porches and talks with everyone. Pepa, not a man known for many words said “okay.” He stood there, a few paces back from the door, and waited. Sure enough, one of the moonshiners who still had both his arms came in with a pocket knife ready to fight over the injustice of his forceful removal. Sadly, my Pepa simply punched the shit out of him. One punch to the face of an alcoholic delivered by a life-long farmer and outstanding corn field baseball player was all it really took for the drunk to not be a problem anymore.  My father and his siblings all remember this day with various details. The unifying theme to this fairly badass story is the awe in which they held their father. Not the perfect father in a time when most dads were hardly Ward Cleaver, I think watching their dad deck a man that had threatened the safety of his family and his store reaffirmed their reverence and respect for the man. In a few days the drunks came back and behaved, and they were allowed to buy their cigarettes and snacks as always. As far as I know, no knives were ever pulled on Pepa again, at least from this crowd.

I find myself envying these stories. I have loads of them in my memory, carefully gleaned primarily from my dad and confirmed by my aunt and uncles. Charming stories, all of them, they make me wonder about the childhood my parents chose for me. I grew up in suburban Atlanta in the 80’s and 90’s. Things were terribly tame and predictable for the most part. I never got to see my dad punch someone who had it coming (although he once threw a table full of pool/tennis keys into the pool because Lance Lewin was being a dick. Everyone in the subdivision knew it. Plus his name was Lance.)

It’s a grass is greener situation, and I really don’t bemoan my privileged childhood.  I think it’s easy and unfortunately too commonplace for my generation to hate their ignorantly blissful youth. But I’m thankful that I have these stolen memories of baling hay for days on end, earning a cold Pepsi from the delivery man, and living on a family farm that had housed other Anderson for generations. The reassuring part is though that’s not who I am, I can claim that as a small part of myself. I can be content with being the son of a son of a farmer. 

The firm of Ziegler, Halpert, and Draper

There is a shocking moment when you settle into your first job. Chances are if you have high expectations for yourself, your first job is not your dream job. Far from it. Few people attend universities to become Xerox Sales Representatives or Clinique Counter Attendants. No, I think when you land that first job after school, chances are you still have some romantic notions of the job that was made for you, the job you deserve because you want it so badly. I myself had a grand idea of a career in media, eventually working as a Communications Director for a Senator or something like that. In hindsight, what I wanted was a role on the West Wing, but moving on…

To be frank, I didn’t see myself working as a recruiter. I never realized there were people who basically worked as professional middle men, but economic facts are a tough pill to swallow when you hit 25. All of a sudden, the content of a career can really become secondary to not having to use a credit card with your dad’s name on it, or being able to have health insurance that isn’t provided by an Obamacare law. There is a satisfaction that comes from providing for oneself, that on a good day can supersede the fact that you are one of the millions of Bachelors holding schmoes who are working nine to five.

You’ve probably also realized that nine to five is a myth perpetuated by baby boomers who actually worked those hours. Eight to six is what I’ve come to know. No one gets paid for their lunch hour, and if you want to get ahead and keep the threats of “paying for your desk” down to a manageable din, you’d better be on time and stay late. You don’t keep a handle of your favorite gin in your desk drawer because Mad Men is fiction. You don’t sit catty corner to the cute receptionist who everyone knows you’ll eventually marry. Chances are you’ll sit next to friendly people who you have to work to find commonality, and you’ll become work friends, a nice enough arrangement built on vague ideas of their personal lives and an encyclopedic knowledge of where they will and will not eat on lunch break.

What I’m thankful for amidst all this lukewarm grumbling is a chance to do something that’s redeeming. I’m not selling pharmaceuticals (read: pieces of my immortal soul), living off my parents, and my job involves getting people working and job needs filled. I think the romance of the dream job is easily lost, but more easily replaced with the realization that your job is not the best way to live a dream. It’s a sad part of the American mindset that whatever you make and whatever it says underneath your name on your business card is the largest part of you. I say this knowing full well that I spend more time in a cube in an Atlanta-adjacent office than anywhere else, but my time doesn’t make me the person I am. Your employer should count himself lucky to have the sum total of your thoughts, experiences, and insight for 40-50 hours a week. It’s the person you bring to that installed desk and phone headset that is important.

So drink the kool-aid for the people that pay you, but don’t get drunk. Get that job, show up, work hard, do what they want, but don’t slip into that scary place of not knowing who you are outside of your toll free number and company email. After all, Don Draper, Toby Ziegler, and Jim Halpert are just waiting for you on Netflix back at your 2BR 2BA slice of moderate maturity.