My parents are both teachers, so we had the summers off.
I turned down a movie this summer because it was nine weeks in Vancouver and my oldest daughter is 14. I've got four more summers with her. I'm not giving away nine weeks of her summer to go do a silly movie.
So I came home and I had a resume and everything, but the only job experience I had was just playing in bars and clubs on my summers off. So, I was temping and stuff during the day and playing music at night.
My high school job was putting insulation in attics - in Louisiana in the summer. It must have been 95 degrees every day, and the insulation used to get all over me. It was not fun. But I didn't know any different. It wasn't like I was spending summers on Cape Cod.
At 11, I went to Misha's school for two summers. So when I wasn't in that school, I was taking classes at David Howard or Robert Denver's studios - kind of legendary places - and there was one summer where Alexander Godunov sort of took me under his wing; the memory's a little murky, but I felt as if I was his project for those weeks.
I'm a Texan. Some of me is still nestled up there in the Catskill Mountains: the summers I spent with my grandfather on the farm and the guys I played basketball with in high school. But then that was it.
I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.
My parents were divorced when I was three, and both my father and mother moved back into the homes of their parents. I spent the school year with my mother, and the summers with my dad.
Believe me, I've done my time travelling the world in cramped conditions and carrying my own luggage. Now my leisure is summers in the south of France or the Hamptons, walking in Connemara, and year-round shopping in Manhattan and Paris.
I played Winnie Cooper on 'The Wonder Years' from ages 12-18, and did a few other movies during some of the summers.
When I was growing up, we had a bungalow in New Jersey which we visited in the summers. Everybody in that small community was named Feldman and was either an aunt or cousin of mine. I just found it comfortable to use the name Feldman.
The coming and going of the seasons give us more than the springtimes, summers, autumns, and winters of our lives. It reflects the coming and going of the circumstances of our lives like the glassy surface of a pond that shows our faces radiant with joy or contorted with pain.
I know April, May and June are a few unbearable months, and working out in a gym and sweating in such dirty hot, sticky, humid weather puts me off. The best way is to swim. I feel so fresh and rejuvenated after swimming, and I believe it's one of the best mode to fitness during summers.
I envisioned that as my life: staying in academia to make a living and then taking summers off to write my novels.
Our Father's commitment to us, His children, is unwavering. Indeed He softens the winters of our lives, but He also brightens our summers.
Teachers are not glorified babysitters with summers off. Their profession fuels all others, and on a normal day that is amazing enough in and of itself.
We just weren't a family that gathered around the TV. I grew up in a town where everyone was outside all the time. I was mostly in Connecticut; I spent a lot of time in Tennessee in the summers, but I was in Stamford, Connecticut.
When I was a boy, one of my uncles had a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin. My family went there for parts of three summers, and I loved it!
Although I grew up in London, I spent summers in Missouri, where my dad lived. It's quite a liberal town, Kansas City. You'd be surprised.
I spent so many summers and New Years and fun times in New Orleans. It was always a place where I felt I could go and actually let go and enjoy the spirit of something.