summer fun times

My mom was driving us to a picnic, going backwards down the highway. Through the front window, we could see the cars behind us with giant matching auras towering high above them. Apparently this was the result of refraction in the tires as the cars drove through puddles. It made the cars look tall and skinny. At some point, we convinced our mom to turn the car around and put the car in drive instead of reverse, and things went much more smoothly.

At the picnic, multiple concerts were going on all around us. Happy hipsters trotted from an outdoor bandshell to a musical parade to a giant rectangular pool that covered half of Queens. It was about two miles long and a mile wide, and we all jumped in and spent the rest of the afternoon breathing underwater, doing backflips.

Then John had to go check his parents into a retirement home and I realized we were 55 years old. The afternoon went downhill from there.

Exes and Drunks

One of my exes tried to rekindle the old flame, but I apparently was having none of it. I told him we should just be friends, and he told me he could do better anyway. So he went off in a huff to the Brazilian supermodel he had waiting in the wings, and I went off to find my friends Kelly and Todd. They were on their way to check out the swim club they had just joined.

It turned out the pool was in the middle of a dive bar in a sketchy part of town. As we splashed around in the surprisingly clean yet small pool, old drunk men leered at us from the barstools. They seemed really upset that the swim club was encroaching on their establishment. It was a bad scene. The gentrification around here is really getting out of hand.

you, me, everyone we know

I went to the beach with my whole family, my parents and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins and all my brother's friends and some of my friends, too. It was a warm day, but not very sunny, and the ocean was a depressing slate gray from far away. When you were actually in it, the water was amazingly clear and full of giant koi in bright oranges and yellows and white.

So we were all hanging out on the beach on assorted beach blankets under rainbow umbrellas. Suddenly, my grandmother announced that my aunt was missing. She had gone swimming in the ocean and never came back. This aunt died twelve years ago, but I guess she was back for the day. We all jumped in the water to look for her. I hugged the coastline to the north, treading water through the koi, looking down at the bottom. Eventually the ocean narrowed into a sort of canal that cut inland. I continued to swim along until it started going through rooms with dramatic lighting from above. There was an apartment, a kitchen, a dorm room, a computer lab.

Eventually, I ended up in a giant restaurant at the University of Michigan. It was packed full of everyone I'd ever met. I started going from table to table, staring at all the faces and asking people if they'd seen my aunt. No one had.