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Author W. Bruce Cameron remembers the lost art of boredom

December 10, 2025

[Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the “Chapters of Our Lives” issue of PREMIUM Magazine, which featured personal storytelling.]

When I was a young boy, there was nothing so thrilling as exchanging the boredom of school for the boredom of summer vacation. I’d trudge through those last days of the academic year with fatigue weighing my every step. I’d sit at my desk, numb and dull, awaiting the last bell of the last day.

And then, freedom! I’d burst from my bed every morning and race outside, where absolutely nothing was going on. Instead of enduring studies and social interaction and games at recess and the rest of it, my friends and I would sit on the curb like lizards in the sun, building up vast reserves of inertia, having conversations like this:

“What do you wanna do?”

“I don’t know, what do you wanna do?”

In 1955, Paddy Chayefsky wrote the screenplay for the classic film “Marty,” starring Ernest Borgnine, which features a lot of exchanges like the one above, but let me tell you: My friends and I invented that dialogue.

We also worked on perfecting our hyperbole:

“I’m so hot, my tongue tastes like a, like a rock that’s all dirty and, and, um, hot.”

“Yeah? Well I’m so hot my blood is like dirt.”

“Well you’re just copying off of me! I said my rock was all dirty.”

“You said it was your tongue. I’m saying all of my blood. That’s a lot worse.”

“Well if you want to talk about blood, my blood feels like it is full of dirty rocks.”

“That’s stupid.”

“You’re stupid!”

“No, you.”

“No, you!”

(Pause.) “So what do you wanna do?”

“I don’t know, what do you wanna do?”

One of the few events to break through the hard crust of our ennui during the week was the arrival of the milk truck, driven by Mr. McCord.

You could hear him coming a block away — wheezing, clanking, held together with wires and glue, puffing black clouds of exhaust. And his truck was in even worse shape. He’d apparently been driving this route since the invention of, well, milk, and the pocked exterior of his truck looked as if it had been strafed by enemy fire.

To supplement the truck’s weak refrigeration unit, whose coils suffered from such bad arteriosclerosis they were barely more effective at cooling than a spot of shade, Mr. McCord packed his products in slabs of ice. Whenever he saw us, Mr. McCord would stop and offer us a piece of ice, a pure, succulent chunk of glacier he’d chip off and hand us so that we could wash the dirt from our rocky tongues.

Then one day a new milk truck appeared, the driver some stranger who scowled when he saw us. “There’s no ice,” he warned us, having already encountered our type of ice-suckers earlier in his route. “It’s a new kind of truck.”

A new kind of milkman, too, we realized, a mean one who didn’t understand what it felt like to have blood like hot dirt.

He marched up the sidewalk and suddenly I was seized with an impulse so out of keeping with the spirit of summer that I almost didn’t recognize it: ambition.

When the mean milkman turned away I sprinted over and up into the back of the milk truck, my heart pounding.

Inside the truck it was dark and cold, like a morgue. I half expected to see old Mr. McCord hanging in there toward the back, but instead encountered racks of milk and cream, and no ice at all.

I knew I had just seconds. Desperate, driven, I opened one of the coolers and raked my fingernails along the metal sides, scratching off some of the hoarfrost and clutching it in my fist.

When I burst out the door, the mean milkman was there. “Hey!” he shouted, grabbing at me as I shot past.

I ran down the street, my friends in pursuit. Panting, we pulled up under a tree, where I showed them my tiny, rapidly melting prize before putting it in my mouth. In a flash, it was gone, but I closed my eyes and swooned for over a minute.

That last piece of ice, I assured my friends, was the sweetest of all.

W. Bruce Cameron hugs dog — Bestselling author W. Bruce Cameron with Shelby, who plays Bella in the movie “A Dog’s Way Home.” (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Author W. Bruce Cameron remembers the lost art of boredom Orange County Register

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