All the drama of near-break-ups and near-expulsions finally faded with spring finals.  Summer was upon us, and once again, Lukus and I were to be parted for three months.  My plans for the summer were even less exciting than the previous summer’s adventures in a sub-sandwich shop with a lusty-eyed creep for an owner in California.  By now, my parents had tired of Tulsa (they never stayed in one place for very long) and had moved to Tyler, Texas.  My 30 hours a week of waiting tables at a pizza joint had somehow missed the mark of paying for my college tuition, so my summer prospects were: waste money on a summer apartment in Tulsa….or….slowly kill my soul and my self-respect and go spend the summer with my parents in Texas.

I chose the latter, labeling me forever as a “wannabe” gypsy.  Lukus, likewise, went back to his parents’ for the summer.

Jobs were scarce in Tyler that year.  I worked at three different places before I found my summer’s calling to work for my dad, who was building a boat-house for a client.  It was actually kinda fun: getting up just past dawn (okay, 8 0’clock), dressing in my grubbiest clothes and spending the day carrying 80 pound bags of cement (no seriously, 80 lbs. of dead weight) to mix and pour for the foundation.  Plus, my dad paid pretty well.  He and I had never gotten along all that well, but when we worked on a project together, it seemed surprisingly pleasant.  It still wasn’t a sexy summer globe-trot, but my arms got pretty toned and I got a great tan framing-out that boat house.

Lukus and I fulfilled our civic-duty and kept the Postal Service in the black for yet another year with our constant love letters.  By now, I had his parents a little worried.  They really wondered about this girl who had managed to make it to Round 2 in their son’s life.  I still hadn’t spent much time with them (except the one time I went to visit them and humiliatingly fell out of their younger son’s treehouse, almost breaking my back on a cinder-block, lying painfully paralyzed on the ground as I whimpered “I’m okay, I’m okay”).  This was their singular impression of me thus far, besides the abstract crayon drawings that I’d color on the envelopes of my letters to Lukus.  They must have thought me odd, indeed.

Lukus came once to visit me in Tyler and we made up for lost kisses time.  But he high-tailed it out of there pretty quickly, hating to watch his girlfriend wallow in such a boring locale, and went back to the much more glamorous Oklahoma City.  Meanwhile, I s..l..o..w..l..y passed the summer pining for the excitement and busyness of college-life, my life to cycle back around again.

I warned ya in the title: this was a boring time.  But the good stuff’s comin’, and boy, it’s good!