(Originally
published 8/19/23)
Once upon
a time, I loved summer. I really did. Oh, sure, it could get blisteringly hot and
ghastly humid in the Bronx. And, too, I grew up on the top floor of a
three-family house with seven residents sharing one bathroom, no air
conditioning, and intermittent brown outs courtesy of Con Edison, our local
utility. That is the way it was when I was a kid. But, come on, summer was also about a vacation by the sea—the New Jersey shore or Long Island, take your pick—baseball, the
Good Humor man, and incessant stoop chatter by young and old alike. School was on holiday, which counted for an awful lot. That fact alone made sleeping with a
wet washcloth a minor inconvenience.
Those
bygone summers are now distant memories. Today, I see more pesky lantern flies
than fireflies, aka lightning bugs, which were ubiquitous in my neighborhood when I was a boy.
Most of their former habitats have been built upon and their mating modus
operandi has been simultaneously stymied by omnipresent lighting sources from
home security cameras, streetlamps, and vehicular overload.
I fondly
recall sitting on the concrete grounds of the alleyway adjoining my home and
enjoying a Good Humor cola-flavored Italian ice with a little wooden spoon. The
ice and spoon cost twenty cents. If memory serves, it was a solid ice ball, but
I relished the thing on those warm, hushed, pitch-black summer nights punctuated with the sporadic glow of lightning bugs. It did not matter to me that the spoon inevitably passed
through the paper cup multiple times during the ice shaving. The sticky
struggle to reach the bottom was well worth it. That is where most of the cola
coalesced, infusing the finishing bites with an incredible summer taste
sensation. Of course, there were better brands of Italian ices around, like
Marinos, but they, alas, were not peddled by the Good Humor man.
Time waits
for no Good Humor man. Oops, that sentence, I fear, violates many of today’s
college and university speech codes. Nevertheless, I will soldier on and, when
needed, use the phrase, “Kill two birds with one stone,” and not as Stanford
University suggests, “Feeding two birds with one scone.” Also flagged as a
violent turn of phrase: “Bury the hatchet.” But I digress, the streets of my
youth are presently overrun with Grubhub and other delivery drivers on fast
scooters and electric bikes, revving cars with tinted windows, and the
occasional "dune buggies" that look like something the Joker rode
around in on the
Batman TV series.
No more
Good Humor trucks pass by—the fleet has long been retired. The ringing of the bells,
heralding their arrival, are no longer heard. Mister Softee, though, still
haunts the back streets with the familiar jingle playing ad nauseum and further
disturbing the peace. I checked out the price of a Mister Softee thick shake:
six dollars for what I consider a small cup. I remember when their thick shake was served in a
monster-sized cup that contained almost a quart. The shakes cost around sixty
cents sometime in the mid-1970s, which the inflation calculator puts at some
four dollars in contemporary dollars.
Contrast
that with the tuition of my high school years (1976-80), which I recall as
being around $800 for the year. Without fail, in the middle of the summer, a
packet arrived with all kinds of depressing back-to-school information,
including an apology from the principal for raising tuition by eight or ten
dollars. That price tag seemed steep back then and it was for my parents, who
sent multiple kids to Catholic grammar and high schools. Plugging in the
inflation calculator again: $800 equals $3800 in 2023 dollars. My high school alma
mater’s current tuition: $10,000. When I graduated college in 1984, my tuition
for two semesters totaled $5,000. Today that money could buy me about $15,000
worth of goods and services. Manhattan College’s tuition for the coming year:
approximately $50,000. What gives? All I can say is “Don’t do the crime if you
can’t do the time.” Also, do not take out the loan if you cannot repay the
lender. I always thought that some of my college courses were a ridiculous
waste of time, especially when considering the enormity of the tuition bill.
Today, with higher education crazy expensive and increasingly Orwellian, that
waste of time and money assumes a higher meaning.
So, I look
around at what has become an urban dystopia. A passing Grubhub guy is doing a
wheelie while on his scooter. Hope he is not delivering a pizza. All I can say
is: This is now and that was then.
