Summer books and jobs

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Summer is the prime season for reading books for pleasure. And physical books are the best way to read long works. You can better focus and reflect as you turn paper pages with your fingers than by looking at and clicking at backlit screens. The physicality of it helps. Science suggests that you remember more of what you read in a physical book than from a screen, though the latter is fine for shorter pieces, especially if  you can discipline yourself from being distracted by the colorful and sometimes blinking features that accompany many Web pages.

The mild revival of small, independent bookstores in recent years shows a healthy desire to escape from digital distractions, which can be anxiety-provoking.

So happy summer reading,  be it fiction (which boosts our imaginative powers and empathy) or nonfiction. Lose yourself in books, maybe while sitting under a tree. Even enjoy the musty smell of an old volume, which may bring back memories.

Take a look at some science on this. This and this.

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I again wonder if the  regime’s sometimes brutal crackdown on immigrants will reduce the number of legal and illegal aliens working on the yards of so many homeowners, middle class on up, this summer. Many of those seasonal jobs used to be done  by American middle-and-even-upper-middle-class high school and college kids, who also worked at such places as beach snack bars. But the immigration influx of the last 30 years changed that in many places.

Will more American kids start doing those discipline-building (if often boring) jobs again? And will AI destroy a lot of summer work that had been performed in offices?

Back in the ‘60’s I had both kinds of jobs – e.g.,  in earlier teenhood cutting grass, weeding and clipping hedges. (I also delivered newspapers by bike, back when those pubs were thick.) In later years I processed paper, mostly bills of lading, in a shipping company’s office on the  then gritty Boston waterfront. For some reason, one of my most vivid memories of that job was when someone swiped $40 I had stuck in a drawer in a desk I was using. I told this tale of woe to a white-haired co-worker named Sylvester Gookin, who sadly noted: “You’ll lose a lot more than that in life.’’

Then I was a counselor  at a camp along a mosquito-friendly lake in Plymouth, Mass., where some of the kids were bigger than me, so I had to be louder than them. Then I was a go-fer in the unairconditioned newsroom of a tabloid newspaper called the Boston Record American, after which I had no desire to go into the newspaper business. Too chaotic and low-paying. But I got into that racket again a year later because it  gave me the first job offer I got after college, and in an air-conditioned newsroom this time.

In these summer jobs, we absorbed the value of showing up on time, learning how to deal with sometimes difficult customers and co-workers and getting an early handle on what we didn’t want to do in life.