I don’t know who “They” is, but they seem to really be a bunch of know-it-alls.

You hear people quoting “They” all the time, and usually in ways that make them sound like they know what they are talking about.

“They say you should drink eight glass of water every day.”

“They say you shouldn’t swim for 30 minutes after you eat.”

And then, just last week, a friend said something after I complained that I didn’t care that Memorial Day was the official start of summer because, as I’ve gotten older, summer and winter really aren’t that different, except in the summer, I don’t have to put on a coat before I leave the house for work.

“They say hard work builds character,” my friend said.

Character schmaracter. As a lot of us headed to the lake or to the beach or to cookouts at friend’s houses this weekend, we all – perhaps subconsciously – celebrated that summer is here.

But the cold, hard reality is that for most of us – many of our teacher friends notwithstanding – Tuesday means a return to work, summer or not.

I admit it. I was devastated when I graduated from college and realized that 16 years of having my summers free was ending. Newspapers, it seemed, didn’t allow their reporters to take June, July and August off.

I had a similar feeling when I realized that electricity didn’t just ooze out of the outlets in the house. Georgia Power expects to get paid for the electricity that I use.

I loved summers as a kid. I don’t know if kids today have it as lucky as we did. First, so many parents I know want to schedule every minute of their child’s day. Second, because of the crazy nature of our world, kids aren’t always able to roam their neighborhoods like we did.

When I was a kid, summers were spent outside.

It’s not that we didn’t have important things to do. We did.

We had forts to build, trails to blaze, baseball to play and fish to catch. And if you didn’t feel like fishing, you could catch tadpoles or turtles and keep them as pets until you got tired of them, at which time you’d set them free again.

This, of course, was in the days before kids could bake their brains playing video games for hours on end on PlayStations and Wiis, back when we had to use your imagination when we played.

We'd hop on our bicycles and ride all over the neighborhood, our bikes becoming fire trucks or Army tanks or spaceships.

I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of kids, and we all spent most of the day outside, chased inside only by the occasional scattered thunderstorm or our mothers’ need for us to help shell peas.

When someone's mother wanted us, she just stepped into the front yard and hollered for us to come.

My friend Andy and I used to ride our bicycles a couple of miles up the road to the Suwannee Swifty store to buy candy and drinks. Suwannee Swifty was the small-town equivalent of the big-city 7-Eleven, which got its name because it stayed open from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.

We didn’t have 7-Elevens back then. Nothing in Blakely stayed open that late.

We stayed in our forts or on our bikes until it got dark. Then it was time to go home.

But that’s usually when the adults would gathered on the front porch and talk about whatever it was adults talked about. The kids would get to run around the yard, playing hide-and-go-seek or Red Rover or whatever.

I really miss those days. I love my job, but I long for those carefree times when the most important thing to worry about was how many turtles you’d catch today.

And I’m sick of “They” telling me how much character I’m building through my long hours at the office.

I really think “They” should just shut up.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays. Read previous columns at gainesvilletimes.com/mitch. Follow him on Twitter @MitchTimes.