When you're a teenager, you absolutely cannot wait for spring break. It's a respite between Christmas and the end of the school year, and for teachers as well as students, it can't come soon enough.
In 1973, My friend from church, Sabrina, invited me to go with her family to Myrtle Beach. We were all going to stay in her family's pop-up camper at Pirateland.
I have to admit, it was quite awkward at first. Her parents slept on one side of the pop-up camper while Sabrina and I slept on the other side, and her brother slept on the floor. It was cramped, so we spent most of our time outdoors.
In preparation for this trip, I had gone to a store in Sumter and purchased a pair of jeans. But horror of all horrors, they looked brand new, and that just wouldn't do.
No one who was anyone would wear jeans that looked brand new back then in the '70s. That was a sure way to lose your teen peer acceptance, so to speak.
To make matters worse, I had long legs and a rather short torso. Back then there was no place to find jeans for tall girls. If I bought jeans in the teen girls department off the rack, they all hit me at my ankles...and that was another way to find yourself the object of ridicule, by wearing "high water" jeans.
So I did the only thing I could... I went straight to the mens department. I bought jeans with a 36-inch length to make sure they would drag the ground two inches longer than my legs.
Perfect. Then the only thing left to do was to make them look raggedy.
Because her family was leaving directly after school, I didn't have time to make my jeans look old and rough. So I had to pack them as they were and off we went to Myrtle Beach.
The first thing I did when I got there was put on my brand new jeans and seeing that Sabrina also had a brand new pair, we decided it was time to go out and rough up our new jeans. We wanted to be stylish.
I spent three entire days wearing the same pair of jeans everywhere I went. We walked through the sand, through the ocean water, through the surf, down the sidewalks, and across roads with our jeans dragging the ground. But not only did they not fray at the hems, they still looked brand new!
I was mortified. I wanted my jeans to look frayed at the bottom but had no idea how to make that happen. We considered taking her dad's pocket knife and hacking at the legs of our jeans, but then we assumed it would probably just look fake and not worn out.
All total, we probably walked 10 miles just to fray the bottoms of our jeans, but it never happened. We trudged through the entire old Pavilion in Myrtle Beach, the entire amusement park across the street, and up and down the boulevard, with our jeans dragging the ground the whole way.
They still looked new. Dirty, but new. Sabrina's parents just raised their eyebrows at us and went on about their business, never letting on that they thought we were insane.
At one point we were so tired from wandering that we flopped down in the sand right outside the Myrtle Beach Pavilion and just sat there staring at the ocean. It was night time and the moon was rising. It was so beautiful, but all I could think about was how my jeans had not frayed one single inch.
It was about that time that this long-haired hippie character showed up, handed us a paper sack, and asked if we would hold it for him. Then he took off running down the beach. When Sabrina looked in the bag, she found it was full of marijuana. We were so shocked and startled that we immediately dug a deep hole in the sand, threw the paper bag down in the hole, and covered it up. It was at that point we decided to get up and hightail it out of there, because I figured that with my rotten luck at 14, I'd get caught and arrested for something I didn't even do.
We never saw the hippie freak again, and it's possible that paper sack is still several feet down in the sand. The funny thing is it's probably still there, but the Pavilion's gone now and so is the amusement park.
Every springtime I think of spring break and that ridiculous time with Sabrina and our jeans. What's even funnier now is that companies sell jeans already frayed and covered in holes just like we wanted back then, but for the life of me, I refuse to pay money for jeans that already look worn out!
That is how I know I am old.
