Summertime

[SPEAKER_00]: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for downloading. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for subscribing to the latest edition of the Twelve Kyle Podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: I am your boy, twelve Kyle. [SPEAKER_00]: Man, check this out. [SPEAKER_00]: On this episode, we are entering at the time of this recording the summer. [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, summer is here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Wherever you are in your listening to this episode, [SPEAKER_00]: I'm willing to bet that it's hot. [SPEAKER_00]: It's hot everywhere. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like today in Atlanta was ninety degrees, but the humidity makes it feel like it was ninety seven degrees, which is crazy in and of itself because your boy was outside walking.

[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and I know that that sounds strange, particularly if you're watching on YouTube, thank you for watching because you can see, I'm in a hoodie. [SPEAKER_00]: And the reason why I'm in is that he's because it's cold in my house. [SPEAKER_00]: Like I had AC on frigid, like there's a button that says frigid, I press frigid. [SPEAKER_00]: So that's where it is. [SPEAKER_00]: Um, nonetheless, I want to talk about the summer. [SPEAKER_00]: More specifically, summertime growing up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, it was. [SPEAKER_00]: It was a great time when the summer arrived.

[SPEAKER_00]: For me, as a kid growing up in South Carolina, more specifically in my hometown of Florence, South Carolina, there was a lot of fun in the summertime because when the main thing, you were out of school, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And so what's interesting now, as opposed to how it was back then, excuse me how things were back then, as opposed to how it is now, when you got out of school, [SPEAKER_00]: at the end of June. [SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me, the start of June.

[SPEAKER_00]: Unless your friends, at least in my hometown, unless your friends lived in your neighborhood, you didn't see your friends again until school started again. [SPEAKER_00]: Like so, I... [SPEAKER_00]: I went the whole summer without seeing a lot of my friends who I went to school with. [SPEAKER_00]: Outside of the kids that lived in my neighborhood because you just didn't, you know, there was no social media. [SPEAKER_00]: There was no Instagram.

[SPEAKER_00]: There was no Facebook or Twitter or TikTok to stay in touch. [SPEAKER_00]: So unless you randomly ran into someone, just on a humble somewhere in the town, you weren't gonna see anybody else from school, particularly your friends. [SPEAKER_00]: But each day in the summertime brought a lot of fun, brought a lot of activity, and I wanted to come on to podcast and talk about this briefing. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll give you an example, like the day for me started relatively early.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, [SPEAKER_00]: I remember getting up mad early. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm talking about like six, seven o'clock. [SPEAKER_00]: You get up at six or seven. [SPEAKER_00]: If you were like me, you prepare yourself a bowl of cereal, frosted flakes or Captain Crunch. [SPEAKER_00]: Shout out to Captain Crunch. [SPEAKER_00]: I love it. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't care what y'all say about it. [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you get your cereal, you watch TV, and then when it gets to a certain time, [SPEAKER_00]: you want to go outside and play, or at least go outside and get your friends so you can go outside and play. [SPEAKER_00]: But here's the thing, like my mom, particularly when we stayed in these apartments, we called them the projects.

[SPEAKER_00]: When we stayed in the projects, my mom would always say, like, you can't go to anybody's house early in the morning, like she had this thing, like, you don't go knocking on anybody's door before night or ten a.m. [SPEAKER_00]: Um, and I, you know, as a child, I didn't really understand it because my thing is if I'm up, then my boys are up. [SPEAKER_00]: They got to be my friends got to be up just like me.

[SPEAKER_00]: So she didn't want me knocking on anybody's door before nine a.m. [SPEAKER_00]: I think nine a.m. [SPEAKER_00]: was the the operative time to check in with your friends. [SPEAKER_00]: But so I would do that. [SPEAKER_00]: So you start the day with a bowl of cereal, wash your face, brush your teeth, the whole night and put your little clothes on outside clothes because we're we're going to be outside all day.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then, and then, and I'm talking about the early years, like my, my, my, I would say my elementary school years. [SPEAKER_00]: Um, so I would go outside and then write around nine o'clock. [SPEAKER_00]: I go, you know, not going to door of, you know, my homies like Jonathan Steven. [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, and so I'd go over there. [SPEAKER_00]: I was in, you know, see if they could come outside and then we'd come outside and we'd play. [SPEAKER_00]: My brother would be there.

[SPEAKER_00]: My younger brother, Damon would be with us. [SPEAKER_00]: And we would literally play. [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever, like, it didn't matter. [SPEAKER_00]: We would play football, we'd play baseball, we'd play on the playground. [SPEAKER_00]: We'd do a little bit of everything. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, that time, we didn't have like a certain agenda as far as like what we were gonna do.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was just really about spending time outside because here's the thing, in the eighties, everything that was happening was happening outside. [SPEAKER_00]: trust me. [SPEAKER_00]: You didn't want to be in the house for anything. [SPEAKER_00]: You didn't want to be in the house too long. [SPEAKER_00]: When it was lunch time, a lot of times we tried to not come home for lunch because you know what would happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you came home for lunch, [SPEAKER_00]: And your mom might not be in a good mood. [SPEAKER_00]: She may tell you to stay in the house. [SPEAKER_00]: So we wasn't trying to hit that. [SPEAKER_00]: But you know, I mentioned like the playground. [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that we used to do in our neighborhood, there was a playground. [SPEAKER_00]: And so when the playground, you had a lot of different things.

[SPEAKER_00]: One thing that you could find on the playground was the merry-go-round. [SPEAKER_00]: Now the merry-go-round. [SPEAKER_00]: was I guess the best way I can describe it for somebody who didn't live through that era it was almost like a death trap like you would literally get on it and somebody would spin it around and you'd stay on it until you you know got dizzy and [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not gonna be, I'm not gonna lie. [SPEAKER_00]: My head's hurting, just thinking about it right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the merry-go-round was a very popular attraction to the playground. [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of kids got on it. [SPEAKER_00]: I actually saw kids going it, get on it, and throw up. [SPEAKER_00]: It was something that I had my turns, but after that, once I did it a few times, I was good on the merry-goer, and I was like, no, I'm not doing this again. [SPEAKER_00]: Another thing we had on our playground in our apartment complex was a slide.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the slide is, you know, it is the one thing that everybody gets on in the neighborhood, right? [SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is growing up in Florence, South Carolina, our summers were brutal. [SPEAKER_00]: Like during the summertime, it would be nine, five, a hundred, a hundred, two degrees during the day. [SPEAKER_00]: That ain't the time that you wanna get on that slide, because that slide, you literally could get third degree burns from sliding down that slide.

[SPEAKER_00]: But we did it anyway. [SPEAKER_00]: It was a lot of fun. [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes people would put poor water on the slide and we'd slide and get our pants wet or whatever like that. [SPEAKER_00]: And we didn't care because it gets wet. [SPEAKER_00]: If you got your shorts wet, it didn't matter. [SPEAKER_00]: You're going to be outside long enough and it was hot enough to tell those shorts and in your underwear, we're going to dry probably within five minutes.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it didn't matter. [SPEAKER_00]: So we spent a lot of time on the slide. [SPEAKER_00]: We also had a, what do you call that thing? [SPEAKER_00]: The thing where you have, I think it's the, I can't remember the name of it, but you sit on one end and the other person sits on the other end and you go up and down, up and down.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm drawing a blank, I can't remember the name of it, but like you literally, as you bounce up and down, you could literally hurt yourself, it's the seesaw, I'm sorry. [SPEAKER_00]: You literally could view a young man, could hurt your nuts. [SPEAKER_00]: But we would do that from time to time. [SPEAKER_00]: We wrote bikes. [SPEAKER_00]: We wrote bikes.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you had a bike in the eighties, you had to ride your bike in the best time to ride your bike was doing it some time. [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of times when I go back to my hometown, I marvel at how far we went on our bikes. [SPEAKER_00]: we literally went miles away from my house. [SPEAKER_00]: And the cool thing about it was it's the summertime. [SPEAKER_00]: It's hot outside more often than not nobody cared.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean because like [SPEAKER_00]: your parents knew that you were gonna go away, but they knew you were coming back. [SPEAKER_00]: So as long as you were home before, you know, a guy dark, you were fine. [SPEAKER_00]: Probably wasn't a safest thing to do. [SPEAKER_00]: When I think about it, because yeah, we did ride quite of a far ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then like, for me and my friends, like we would ride over to this neighborhood and this neighborhood, which was like a neighborhood, probably about, I don't know, two or three miles away. [SPEAKER_00]: And we would go over there and play football because like they quote unquote had some stars over there. [SPEAKER_00]: So we would take our stars, we played against their stars. [SPEAKER_00]: And we dust them because I was wondering stars.

[SPEAKER_00]: But um, it was just a lot of fun. [SPEAKER_00]: It was just a lot of fun. [SPEAKER_00]: I love riding my bike now. [SPEAKER_00]: The key thing about riding your bike is [SPEAKER_00]: You gotta be mindful about where you put your bike down because people did steal bikes back in a day. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll never get this kid stole my bike and he lived in the same apartment complex as me.

[SPEAKER_00]: stole my bike because I left what happened was it was summertime again I went inside for some lunch I didn't bring my bike with me I left my bike outside right by the bench and I'm thinking okay I'm in the house you know for twenty minutes thirty minutes or whatever like that everybody in the neighborhood knows you and they know your bike I had a orange twin bicycle ten speed it meant that bicycle so don't and again it was orange so it was you couldn't mistake it right

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'll never forget, I go get lunch, I come back downstairs and the bike is calling. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, who stole my, you know, somebody take my bike? [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm thinking at first that maybe one of the homies grabbed it, you know, just to sort of write it out through the take it and come to find out somebody stole it. [SPEAKER_00]: And there was this one kid and his family. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not gonna call his name, Paul Jones.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he were known for stealing stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: And a couple of days, well, now this kid didn't have a bike. [SPEAKER_00]: But a couple of days later, he automatically, he mysteriously came up with a quote unquote new bike. [SPEAKER_00]: And this bike was instead of being orange, it was red. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the bike looked a whole lot like mine. [SPEAKER_00]: And so there was some discussion about you stole my bike, no I didn't, you stole my bike, no I didn't.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can't remember how that ended. [SPEAKER_00]: I just remember my mom being very upset and we couldn't prove that there wasn't his bike, but you know, his, he lied and his mom lied about the fact that they took the bike, but you got, you know, you living your life. [SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to kick his ass, but I couldn't, because my mom told me not to. [SPEAKER_00]: But looking back on it, I probably should have kicked his ass. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we rode our bikes.

[SPEAKER_00]: We did a lot of playing outside. [SPEAKER_00]: Football was was the main sport. [SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, [SPEAKER_00]: Then the summertime, that's when you hone your skills.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where I develop my game, if you will, playing against not only my friends, but some of the bigger kids as well. [SPEAKER_00]: And the cool thing about it, we played tackle football, like, and we had in our apartment complex, we had this huge grass field. [SPEAKER_00]: I thought it was a football field. [SPEAKER_00]: It was my playground. [SPEAKER_00]: It was where I played and where I honed my skills. [SPEAKER_00]: I learned how to catch.

[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually became a wide receiver in that's the position that I played for Little League football, which I started at the age of eight. [SPEAKER_00]: And I played Little League football through middle school, through high school, and all the way through college at South Carolina State University. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, had it not been for those summertime games and playing with my friends, I probably would have never played football collegially.

[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, the summers were great, man. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like I just remember going to the store and as a corner store in the neighborhood and we would go to the corner store and what's funny is the name of the store. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the name is, I think the name still stands. [SPEAKER_00]: The name of the store that was on the corner was called four-way stop.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason why they called it a four-way stop was many years prior to before I even got there, there was no traffic light. [SPEAKER_00]: You could only, you know, that the cars had to come to a stop and it was based on whoever got to the intersection first, they could go. [SPEAKER_00]: So it was technically and literally a four way stop. [SPEAKER_00]: So you had to, you know, kind of yield to the other person or whatever like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the, I seriously think that that store is, I know the store was still there. [SPEAKER_00]: I think the store is still named for a waste stop. [SPEAKER_00]: And that store has been sitting there, man, probably, forty, five years, maybe, maybe longer than that. [SPEAKER_00]: But it's been as long as I can remember. [SPEAKER_00]: So we would go to the four way stop and if you had some money, listen, if you had a dollar, that would go a long way.

[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't have a lot of money. [SPEAKER_00]: I'll be honest. [SPEAKER_00]: And the department said we stayed in was for low income housing. [SPEAKER_00]: We were broke, but we didn't have money like that. [SPEAKER_00]: So it was, um, we, but we always had what we needed. [SPEAKER_00]: So I, I'd never felt like, you know, like, we were struggling anything. [SPEAKER_00]: We might have a struggle.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, and even to this day, I don't know how much my mom and dad made. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it was a lie. [SPEAKER_00]: It definitely wasn't what I make myself. [SPEAKER_00]: But it was still fun. [SPEAKER_00]: And we would go to the store and you have your little dollar, you get, you know, juice, which we call a quarter-water and you get that in some chips and maybe like a honey bun and all that would be under a dollar.

[SPEAKER_00]: and you walk back or ride your bike's back home. [SPEAKER_00]: And those are just some good times. [SPEAKER_00]: And again, it's a thousand degrees outside. [SPEAKER_00]: We didn't care, like I do literally. [SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting because the heat, I don't like the heat. [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, as long as I've lived in it, I'm living in the South all my life pretty much. [SPEAKER_00]: So I don't like the heat and I live in Atlanta as high here.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like being, I'm an outside person. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm an outdoorsman. [SPEAKER_00]: But I don't like being in the heat, which is contradictory because [SPEAKER_00]: You have to be outside at some point in time. [SPEAKER_00]: You have to be in the heat at some point in time. [SPEAKER_00]: But I've learned to kind of get accustomed to the heat. [SPEAKER_00]: I deal with it. [SPEAKER_00]: Just like, I guess people in the North do during the winter time.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I said that to say this. [SPEAKER_00]: It's hot outside. [SPEAKER_00]: We're riding up ice. [SPEAKER_00]: We don't care. [SPEAKER_00]: We're drinking water. [SPEAKER_00]: We're drinking gatorade. [SPEAKER_00]: We're drinking. [SPEAKER_00]: We drink a lot of sodas. [SPEAKER_00]: Shout out to Coca-Cola and Spray. [SPEAKER_00]: Drink a lot of that growing up. [SPEAKER_00]: Even the mountain dude, I don't do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: found dudes probably the nastiest thing you would want to drink as far as a soft drink, but we drank a lot of it and we didn't care. [SPEAKER_00]: And we didn't eat healthy because like I said, we ate chips and stuff like that. [SPEAKER_00]: And so Doritos, those were favorite. [SPEAKER_00]: And so again, it's the summertime. [SPEAKER_00]: So you gotta come if you don't go to the store.

[SPEAKER_00]: You gotta come home for lunch, so you gotta, you know, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or ham and cheese or for those of you who ate baloney. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'll be honest, never been a fan of baloney. [SPEAKER_00]: Never been a fan of fried baloney either. [SPEAKER_00]: And people say, people don't even say, man, you think you rich? [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not rich. [SPEAKER_00]: I just, it never appealed to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I wasn't, so like if we had, [SPEAKER_00]: If we didn't have, like, let's just say we didn't have a peanut butter jelly and baloney was the only option, ain't he? [SPEAKER_00]: And then, like, I have friends who, in the summertime, we were told that one of the ways to stay cool is to eat a particular fruit. [SPEAKER_00]: One of the fruits that they would hand out, and people would actually sell a lot in our neighborhood for watermelons. [SPEAKER_00]: I hate watermelon.

[SPEAKER_00]: I never like watermelon. [SPEAKER_00]: Watermelon is nasty to me. [SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that I'll eat remotely closely to watermelon is watermelon delicious chewing gum. [SPEAKER_00]: So we would have, so we had a friend who, his mom, she would cut up slices of watermelon and hand them out to kids and stuff while they're outside. [SPEAKER_00]: Just so that that would keep them cool. [SPEAKER_00]: Me, nothing. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't want your watermelon.

[SPEAKER_00]: but we spent a lot of time outside. [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of time, just doing different things, we would be playing in the dirt, we would be playing. [SPEAKER_00]: There was a ditch near nearby, and a ditch had a little ravine, and it had a stream of water in it. [SPEAKER_00]: There was some branches that you could swing on basically from one side of the ravine to the other side. [SPEAKER_00]: So we would pretend like we were torsive.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we were going to branch across the little creek, never falling in. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, we had a lot of fun, man. [SPEAKER_00]: We had the summertime in the eighties was everything. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you did have to go in the house by the time, I think like, in the eighties one was the time that we finally got cable TV.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you did have to go in the house, at least you had something to watch because [SPEAKER_00]: going from you know the regular channels to cable TV was a game changer because you went from having when we had just regular TV it was literally just four channels ABC NBC CBS and like PBS and that was it like that's all that you had but once we got cable TV we got a we got a slew of different channels got CNN we got channels like MTV listen [SPEAKER_00]: I quickly became a fan of MTV.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing that I loved about the summertime was that in watching MTV, I learned a lot about a lot of music that I never listened to. [SPEAKER_00]: For example, you know, listening to twisted sisters come on field the noise. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, where else was I going to learn that in my neighborhood? [SPEAKER_00]: There was nobody else that was playing that song. [SPEAKER_00]: but I could turn on MTV and I'd hear, or I could hear Van Halen's jump.

[SPEAKER_00]: And these are songs that resonated with me, groups that resonated with me, artists and everything that I got to know just from watching MTV and eventually BET would come on and then we would kind of take off from there. [SPEAKER_00]: But when you were in the house, you know, [SPEAKER_00]: You did have access and then we had video games as well. [SPEAKER_00]: We had the Atari, twenty six hundred, which in my opinion was the greatest game console ever.

[SPEAKER_00]: But again, it's the summertime so you want to be outside. [SPEAKER_00]: So we go. [SPEAKER_00]: So when you come in from lunch, maybe you watch a little TV, maybe each sandwich and then you come back outside. [SPEAKER_00]: And the rest of the day it would just be, you literally, there was no agenda. [SPEAKER_00]: Like you literally would just do whatever you wanted to do. [SPEAKER_00]: So if somebody said, hey, let's go over the print street.

[SPEAKER_00]: We would literally walk over the print street. [SPEAKER_00]: And we would go see people on a print street shout out to the homie Reg from print. [SPEAKER_00]: I call them the prints of print street. [SPEAKER_00]: And so like, those years right there were just so much fun. [SPEAKER_00]: It continued. [SPEAKER_00]: Once we moved from the apartments to my parents' water house, which was maybe about a mile and a half away, we were closer to my school.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, just summertime was still cool. [SPEAKER_00]: Then as well, we spent a lot of time outside hanging out with our friends racing. [SPEAKER_00]: We rode our bikes. [SPEAKER_00]: We jumped ramps. [SPEAKER_00]: We did a little bit of everything. [SPEAKER_00]: By the time I got to middle school, my parents got divorced and we moved to the other side of town and north side.

[SPEAKER_00]: And now that was a game changer because now we're in a better neighborhood, a very quiet neighborhood. [SPEAKER_00]: We're in sporting heights, uh, if you know, you know. [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, that was different in and of itself because even on my street, everybody knows everybody. [SPEAKER_00]: Everybody's pin on that street for like ten plus years by the time we get there. [SPEAKER_00]: And we had a pool. [SPEAKER_00]: And we had a huge driveway.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, [SPEAKER_00]: We would play as I got older by the time I got to middle school and especially high school. [SPEAKER_00]: Some of the time consisted of my boys coming over and we played three or three in the driveway. [SPEAKER_00]: And my driveway was literally like the fabulous floral or the Boston Garden. [SPEAKER_00]: We had legendary pickup games there.

[SPEAKER_00]: Every now and then we do four and four, but it was the driveway was big enough to hold a four and four, but it seemed more intimate and more. [SPEAKER_00]: We got more movement when we went three or three. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it with people would always, my friends would always say like, you haven't hooked unless you hooked at Kyle's house. [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know why my friends loved to come over and play.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I wasn't the only one on the street who had a basketball goal, but [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they would always come over and then obviously in the summertime by the time I get to, I don't know, eleven to twelve grade. [SPEAKER_00]: I, I mentioned we had a pool, but then we started hosting pool parties. [SPEAKER_00]: We, we, we throw at least one or two pool parties per summer. [SPEAKER_00]: Me and my cousin Eric, who's the same age as where Eric's nine months younger than me.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's my partner in crime. [SPEAKER_00]: And so. [SPEAKER_00]: The pool parties were always interesting because of the girls, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Young black girls in the tenth and leavened grade, a twelve grade, you know, they don't want to get their hair wet.

[SPEAKER_00]: They don't want to, you know, they just, some of them don't even want to put on bikinis, but we would always, there was always be that one girl that showed up, you know, in a bathing suit and she ain't shaved. [SPEAKER_00]: And as little hot young boys, we love that. [SPEAKER_00]: We love that. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why she would come to a pool party like that, but hey, we didn't care. [SPEAKER_00]: We were looking. [SPEAKER_00]: But it was dope. [SPEAKER_00]: And it was dope.

[SPEAKER_00]: And by the time we were seniors in high school, we had a couple pool parties. [SPEAKER_00]: And we were throw some food on the grill. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we got it in. [SPEAKER_00]: And we, the summers would don't. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, there's not, I can't tell you that I had a bad summer. [SPEAKER_00]: By the time I get to college, it's I'll tell you how to say university, the summers are on another level.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because now it's the cream, now it's girls, now it's basketball every day. [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, like, we literally would hoop every day. [SPEAKER_00]: And I just remember one day, remember one day.

[SPEAKER_00]: fellas came over because they would always come over probably about five o'clock and then it's still hot outside it's still hot outside we hoop for a couple of hours and you know so now it's dark and everybody would go home and shower and then they come back to my house [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, why are y'all keep coming miles? [SPEAKER_00]: They're like, man, this the hangout might, my house literally became the hangout spot. [SPEAKER_00]: And it was cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: Listen, my mom and my aunt love the fact that kids would come over. [SPEAKER_00]: And kids always felt welcome in my house because we had this huge den where we would just kind of hang out in the den. [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, like, if we had girls come over or something like that, we any company, you know, we kick it all in the den.

[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but it's just you know like as the kid or young man I'd like to leave my house like I don't want [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what this girl come over here. [SPEAKER_00]: I want to go somewhere where she is or vice versa. [SPEAKER_00]: My house was always a hangout spot with the fellas still is to this day. [SPEAKER_00]: I got so many stories. [SPEAKER_00]: A few of them I can and will tell on this podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Cool. [SPEAKER_00]: The crew rules may not allow me to tell a few, but the ones that I can't tell I'll tell on this podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: But the summertime was dope. [SPEAKER_00]: It was dope. [SPEAKER_00]: And the summer's got better each year as I got older. [SPEAKER_00]: And now as an adult, the summers don't, they don't hit the same because you have responsibility.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not like I have all day. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I work another five. [SPEAKER_00]: And when I log off, I can step outside in my yard and cut the grass, which is something that I enjoy doing. [SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, I don't spend as much time outside as I probably should. [SPEAKER_00]: I really enjoy the time that we have here in Atlanta, and more specifically, before it gets really, really high.

[SPEAKER_00]: But right now, at the time of this recording, we are headed into what we call the dog days of summer. [SPEAKER_00]: the days where it's ninety five ninety six ninety seven degrees the hitty heat index is like one or five one ten and it's really really tough you to breathe outside if you have um respiratory issues uh i don't and i i i'm a freely outside i don't have any restrictions um but you know for some people it's very tough so i i recognize that

[SPEAKER_00]: but sometimes it's still fun obviously we have more light hours so I try to get outside and do something if it's something in the yard or just get outside and just be out but I do love being outside and again the summertime is it's a good time [SPEAKER_00]: Again, the schools are out, so there's less traffic with me being a father, the kids are home. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, kind of occupying them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that's, you know, some of the differences is with their childhood and my childhood is that my kids don't really hang out outside like that. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I remember one time when our oldest two were younger, I sent them outside for something and I told them to go outside and play. [SPEAKER_00]: And anywhere else I have about fifteen minutes, and they came back in a house and they said Dad is too hot. [SPEAKER_00]: There's no such thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's no such thing as it being too hot. [SPEAKER_00]: It's never been too hot. [SPEAKER_00]: It was never too hot in the eighties. [SPEAKER_00]: Granny, it was probably a thousand degrees, but we still were outside. [SPEAKER_00]: We were still on the playground. [SPEAKER_00]: We were still on our bikes. [SPEAKER_00]: We were still going to get ice cream. [SPEAKER_00]: We were still going to the four-way stop store. [SPEAKER_00]: We did it all.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, like, to hear kids nowadays talk about it being too hot to be outside. [SPEAKER_00]: That's nonsense, but, you know, we raised kids to be inside because [SPEAKER_00]: everything for them happens inside or on their phones. [SPEAKER_00]: Fortunately for us, everything happened outside because the summertime, that's where you wanted to be outside because everything happened then. [SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, I wouldn't change it for the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've learned to appreciate those years and the time that we've had in the summertime and [SPEAKER_00]: Their days where I wish I could just jump in the time machine and go back. [SPEAKER_00]: Since there is no such thing as the time machine, I do feel fortunate that I do have those members. [SPEAKER_00]: Ladies and gentlemen, that's going to do it for me. [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks again for checking out this edition of the twelve tile pie crust.

[SPEAKER_00]: Be sure to subscribe to the pie crust. [SPEAKER_00]: We've got new episodes every Thursday and every Sunday at midnight. [SPEAKER_00]: If you're on YouTube, thank you for watching. [SPEAKER_00]: Be sure to download, like, subscribe and share this pie crust with a friend. [SPEAKER_00]: Again, we also have a new baby. [SPEAKER_00]: Our new baby is called the rap soul podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the rap soul podcast wherever you're listening or watching this podcast because it's on YouTube as well. [SPEAKER_00]: The rap soul podcast is the intersection where we have discussions about music and artists from the eighties, nineties and the two thousands who want to come to rap soul hip hop and R&B. [SPEAKER_00]: Simply put folks is the best music podcast that you've never heard. [SPEAKER_00]: So make sure that you check it out.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Five thousand. [SPEAKER_00]: Cheers!