Will you be going away for a vacation this summer, dear readers, or will you be taking a “staycation” in your own backyard?
As the junior high language arts teacher at St. Isaac Jogues Catholic School in Hinsdale, Ill., my favorite assignment of the year was always the Postcard Project.
Summer project
On the last day of school every spring, I sent a letter to my incoming students offering them the opportunity to start the fall semester with extra credit by sending me a postcard over the summer.
The postcard could be from a vacation destination, or if they weren’t traveling anywhere, it could simply be a 4×6 piece of cardboard cut from the front of a cereal box. In addition to telling me about their summer, they had to provide the name and author of at least one book they had read over the summer — corroborating parent initials required.
At the end of August, students and staff alike looked forward to seeing the collection of colorful and creative postcards displayed on large bulletin boards in the hall outside my classroom. I loved getting those postcards and have saved some of the most memorable ones in a shoebox on my closet shelf (next to my box of old letters). May I share a few of them with you now?
Some postcards
Nora Sweeney went camping in Prestonsburg, Ky., with her family and mailed me a postcard of the lovely lake at Jenny Wiley State Resort Park.
“I really liked seeing the play Oliver at the outdoor theater here, but the most fun was seeing Dad jump two feet straight up in the air with my little brother on his shoulders when a giant black snake wriggled across the hiking trail right in front of him!” (She never mentioned reading any book, but I gave her partial credit anyway).
Gavin Goudy reported, on the back of his St. Louis Arch postcard, that while attending a family reunion he “really had fun with my cousins at the hotel pool until things got rough and a deck chair got knocked into the pool. My library book of The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (I really, really liked it!) was on that chair and got ruined in the water. We’re arguing about who should have to pay for the book, me or my cousin.”
Patrick Shanahan earned quite a bit of money over the summer babysitting for a neighbor. On the back of a homemade Tony the Tiger postcard, Patrick wrote, “I read the whole The Indian in the Cupboard trilogy (by Lynne Reid Banks) to Connor, the kid I babysat for. Connor really liked the books, but I LOVED the books and sometimes had to bribe Connor with ice cream just to let me keep reading a little longer when he wanted to move on to something else.”
Think back on some of your long ago and far away vacations, dear readers; if you had sent a postcard on one of those trips, what might you have written?
Imagined postcards
Every summer, I spent a week with my cousins at our grandparent’s cottage on Lake George in northern Indiana.
One year when my cousin Joel and I were about seven, I might have sent this postcard home to my folks: “Last night Grandpa whitewashed the dock and told us not to walk on it until the next day, but when we were chasing lightning bugs right before bedtime, Joel forgot and ran right out onto the dock.
“His footprints were very faint but the bottoms of his feet were bright white. We were all afraid of what Grandpa would do when he saw the dock in the morning (Joel slept with socks on in an attempt to hide the evidence), but to our shock and delight, he did nothing!
“He said nothing! But somehow, overnight, the faint outline of feet on the dock had been carefully colored in with dark black paint.” (Those footprints are still there these 60 years later!)
The postcard I would have sent while on our family trip to Washington, D.C., when I was 10 would have read, “I don’t remember any of the historical stuff we saw; all I remember was that the day we walked around the most was the hottest day on record (the time and temperature on the sign outside a bank said it was 106 degrees) and because my dad was running low on cash (the man at the popsicle stand wouldn’t take travelers’ checks), I had to share a snow cone with my brothers. It was humiliating and disgusting but I did it anyway.”
When I was in my early teens — my younger brothers were around eight and ten at the time — our family drove to Florida.
When we finally arrived at our hotel, the boys (who had excitedly changed into swimsuits in the back seat of the Chrysler Town and Country station wagon long before even reaching the Florida state line) begged to go to the swimming pool on their own (they were excellent swimmers) while the rest of the family unpacked.
What the postcard would have read
My postcard describing the subsequent excitement would have read: “When we finally made it down to the hotel pool, the boys were nowhere in sight. We alerted the lifeguard who alerted hotel security and within minutes there were at least 20 people searching high and low for Kevin and Mark all over that Holiday Inn. When the sheriff arrived (he showed up early in the hunt accompanied by four deputies), he pointed out that if the boys were in the vast orange groves behind the hotel, they would be quite lost. Just then, Dad returned with the boys in tow. They had rushed out of our hotel and headed for the first pool they spied which happened to be across the highway at Howard Johnson’s!”
I hope your memories of past vacations are all good ones, and I hope all your future travels are safe, relaxing, and free from black snakes, record high temperatures, mischief with cousins, and interactions with the sheriff.
Perhaps you might even consider surprising someone by sending them a postcard, although it’s very difficult to find them in stores. They don’t seem to carry them anymore. You might need to make your own using a rectangle cut from your box of All Bran.
Happy summer!
Linda E. Kelly is a member of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Madison.