Now that summer's officially halfway over, it's time we talked about the thing that always said summertime to me, the lowly squirtgun (and that's just how spelled it, all one word). Growing up in the fifties there wasn't a whole lot of variety to be found when it came to water warfare. You had four basic types, and three of them you could find anywhere: the Buck Rogers raygun type, the tommygun (which looked great, but usually broke within the first half-hour of mortal combat), and then the holy of holies, the Luger style. They were usually cast in a bright green or yellow, but if you could find a black one, you were literally King of the Street, and all the other kids had to bow at your presence. No matter its hue, the Luger squirtgun had a mean and nasty heft, and filled your hand like it was born there.
But...there was a fourth type, and as rare as neutronium: the Greenie-Meanie. True to their name, they were as green as a lime LifeSaver, but their best feature was their compact size. A Greenie-Meanie could easily be concealed in you hand, and then through some its hellish design, fired covertly. Hence, there scarcity. Teachers (and their pawns, our parents) made sure they they were hard to find, as the invariably made the last week of school actually bearable. Especially when you could nail the teacter's pet, Faye Nicholson, right in the back of her neck from eight feet out. So as I said, they were rare, but if you found one--and could keep it--even a Lugar-bearer, would make room for you as you passed.
Nowadays we're civilized, of course. A lad (or lass) brings a Greenie Meanie to school, it's suspension and counseling. ‘Cause, yanno, first it's shooting little Marty Quattlebaum in the back with a stream of water, then it's parking a nine millimeter parabellum round in his brainpain. As Barney Fife used to say, “We have to nip it! Nip it in the bud!”
Curmudgeon mode ON:
Fourth of July has only now gone, and just today we got a doorhanger ad about a back-to-school sale at Sears. But is that such a bad thing? Kids today ought to be grateful we let ‘em out of school at all. Why, back in my day we went to school eight hours a day, from September 1 through June 30, most of the time in heavy snowdrifts so deep as to make a Saint Bernard reconsider its calling. At night we had to listen to the wind howling through the slats in the attic while we rubbed Granny's feet by a sputtering coal fire.
And in the summer we had to chop cotton, string chili peppers, top tobacco, harvest corn, slop the hogs, bore out the cows' teats, and fix breakfast for the farmhands, all before 4 AM. And then maybe, maybe once or twice our parents would let us go to the swimmin’ hole for an afternoon, but even then it wasn’t fun. The place was deep and muddy and warm and we always lost two or three kids each summer to the monster catfish that came up from the bottom, jaws agape. These young’uns today just don’t know how sweet they have it. Kids today, is all...
Curmudgeon mode OFF
None of the foregoing is true, by the way. Artistic license, you understand...