I thought that I was Bo Duke ...

I thought that I was Bo Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard, but I wasn’t anywhere nearly that cool. This is the story of a tenth summer that would have a profound affect on an impressional mind. This was the year that …

1981 was the summer that baseball players went on strike for a long, long time. It was the summer that I discovered that life was a business and that my heroes, like George Brett, Mike Schmidt, and Alan Trammell were nothing more than big business men entertaining. I wondered if dudes like Billy Joel and Jimmy Buffet were the same way. They were the people that my mom and dad listened to when they entertained. Was everyone a big business person and nothing really mattered? I mean, here I was ten, thinking that when I was my parents’ age, I wouldn’t ever get an oil change, I would trade the car in. Yeah, they said that was unrealistic, but I said, “Wait and see …” They’re still waiting and I’m not seeing anything like that materialize at this point …

Anyway, back to 1981. This is the summer that I started to grow up and become a teen-ager. It would still be a couple years before I was actually a teen, but this is something that was materializing. I would do my normal chores around the house like mow our mega large yard with dad’s Craftsman lawn tractor and things like that, but I was figuring out some other things, too.