My Best Friend’s Daughter
Oh, to be young again…
The thing about teachers is that, as much as you love the occasional national holiday, you somehow always long for summer at some point.
I’d been teaching English Lit to teenagers for the better part of twenty years. Time had flown by, my youthful optimism began to fade, and I had more than a few mournful discoveries about my aging body. It would have been depressing if I wasn’t usually busy enough to distract myself.
That is, until my summer job for the park district fell through.
“Sorry, Jack,” Milo — the head honcho over there — told me a week before summer break began. “I had a lot of applications from teens for their first jobs, and we have to give them a chance, you know?”
“So you’re resorting to age discrimination now, Milo?” I asked.
The young man knew me too well, though, from the way he grinned. “What, are you going to report me?”
“Nah,” I said, “but I do expect you to buy me a drink or two over at our local watering hole the next time you’re free.”
“Have a nice summer, Jack.”
It shouldn’t have sounded like he was giving me the verbal equivalent of the finger, but that was just the way Milo was. I’d grown used to his barbed words; they were just…
