Due Tuesday, June 3- "The Wonder Years." Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer. Share a memory of those endless summers when you were growing up. Those carefree days of climbing trees and riding bikes, catching butterflies and roller skating. Here's everyone's chance to wax poetic about the "good old days." If you aren't camera shy, maybe share a photo of your preteen self.

My memories of my Wonder Years is like so many of yours... I was a tomboy and I spent my time outdoors riding my bicycle, playing hide-and-go-seek, climbing trees and fences. I remember we would travel from one end of the block to the other strictly by fence. But I thought I'd write about what made my childhood maybe a little different from a lot of yours. I was born and grew up in Southern California and I've always lived just a matter of minutes from the beach. As you can see from my photo, I was always in a swimsuit and as my mom always said, "brown as a berry." I was probably around ten years old in this photo and my friends and I would spend almost every day at the beach. We liked to go to Santa Monica beach and our parents would drop us off at around 10am and pick us up at 3 or 4pm. Sounds unbelievable, doesn't it? We'd never think of letting our kids do that now. But it was different back then. There is a very well known stretch of beach between Venice and Santa Monica that has a boardwalk. It's actually paved and not made of boards at all and there was a little tram that would run up and down the beach. Sometimes we would start out by Venice Beach and ride the tram to P-O-P (Pacific Ocean Park- an Amusement Park that used to be on the pier) and then ride further to Muscle Beach (famous for all the muscle men who worked out there) which was near the Santa Monica Pier (home of the famous carousel in movies like The Sting.) When I say "ride" the tram- that is a bit of a misnomer because we always ran along behind it and jumped on when the driver wasn't looking. It was just more fun that way. We used to stop at the original "Hot-Dog-On-A-Stick." We would buy a corndog, slathered in mustard and a huge glass of fresh lemonade. We would rent what they called surfriders- very heavy-duty canvas rafts- that we used to surf the waves. We would spend hours in the water catching wave after wave. I still remember the exhilaration I'd feel dropping from the crest of a wave and riding it in all the way to the shore. We'd get so tired that sometimes we'd ride a last wave in and then just lay on the rafts letting the tide take us in and out. What a great feeling that was- the warm sun, the cool salty water, and just being gently rocked by the surf. In those sweet, carefree days, summers truly did seem endless!