Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is more of a guest speaker, because it’s the only way I could get my dad to share a summertime story with us. I dragged this one out of him while he made potstickers to go with our leftovers from Forbidden City last week.

“You could write about riding the bus all over town,” I suggest. My grandma was a city bus driver, and my dad and his siblings used her passes to traverse the town.

Dad doesn’t like that idea, though.

“That’s the highlight of my childhood?” he says. “Riding the bus?”

“It doesn’t have to be a highlight,” I say. “Just a memory. What about the time you hitchhiked to Florida?”

“That was Easter.”

“Didn’t you do anything during the summer?”

And then the big reveal: “I broke my leg one summer.”

“That’s a good story!” I say. And one I don’t think I’ve heard before.

“That’s not a good story,” he protests.

“But it’s a story,” I tell him, and he finally agrees to share it.

“I was in the Boy Scouts,” he says. “The Boy Scouts was a traumatic experience. I was a Boy Scout for one summer. Maybe a year. In the wintertime I went on a ‘polar bear’ …”

“What’s a ‘polar bear’?” I ask.

“I slept outside in the winter in a tent,” he says. “And then in the summertime we went on a canoe trip and I spent the rest of eternity selling cookies and working at pancake suppers and trying to raise money to go to camp for two weeks. And the week before I went to camp? I broke my leg riding my bicycle down the soapbox derby hill. So I couldn’t go to camp. And I spent my summer in a cast.”

“That’s a sad story,” I say.

“They’re all sad stories,” he says.

And then we sit down to a dinner of leftovers, pot stickers and corn nuggets. Which is a strange combination but not a sad story at all.