Tuesday: I intended to start writing yesterday morning, and then the morning got away from me. Yesterday was the first no-school day, so our morning routine has changed a bit, and I thought that I had more time than I actually did. It's always later than you think. Well, it's always later than I think, anyway.
So now it's 7:15 (AM). Cloudy, with silvery pale sunlight and dense humidity, and it feels like a morning at the beach. I’m keeping track of the time this morning. I’m on top of things.
And now it’s 9:15 PM. Today was a back-to-back meeting day. I'd planned to go outside and take a short walk between meetings, but a sudden heavy rainstorm derailed my plans. And then within ten minutes, the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, giving way to intense, mad-dog-and-Englishmen noonday sun and the smell of ozone as the pavement dried. The air was dense; so humid that it was just short of condensation back into rain. The grass and trees and shrubs were jungle-green and dewy. You know how sometimes a garden or a lawn goes from lush and verdant to sloppy and overgrown, all in the space of minutes? The whole world looked like those few minutes. I walked in the sun as the rain dried. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in the office, and then the rain started again.
The rain stopped, again, and I finished work, came home, made dinner, and went swimming. The pool water has been warming gradually, from icy to chilly to tolerable to just right. All of this is to say that it feels like summer, finally.
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*****
I use spell-check, but only as a fail-safe for typos. My eyes aren’t what they used to be—when I was younger, no typo had a chance against me. I’ve noticed something with Word’s spell-check feature. When you spell-check a document, and spell-check doesn’t find any errors (this still happens fairly often—I’m pretty good), the pop-up reads “Spelling and grammar check is complete—You’re good to go!” Not only confirmation that the spell-check has done its job, but a congratulatory exclamation point. But when you run spell-check and ignore any of Word’s grammar or spelling recommendations, the pop-up reads “Spelling and grammar check is complete.” Full stop. It comes across as a little bitter, a little truculent. No “good to go,” no exclamation point…it’s as if Word is washing its hands of you.
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It's Wednesday now. I'm at a Wednesday night swim meet, with no job. Not as in unemployment, just no swim meet job. This is very rare for me; very rare indeed. Rumbling thunder cut the meet short, and there was a mad scramble to clean up the pool as quickly as possible before the rain started. A friend and I, both of us long-veteran swim parents, were walking toward the parking lot to stow our handbags so that we could come back to help clean up, and we saw the meet manager walking toward us.
“Let’s say ‘Good night, Lois—see you Saturday’ and keep walking, just to see what she says,” I said to my friend.
“Awesome,” she said. We executed perfectly, and then cackled like idiots when she fell for it. Then we all cleaned up together, and I thought about how lucky I was that I got to go home over an hour earlier than I expected; and even luckier to clean up a swim meet with these people, who I love and whose children I love; all during my beloved summer.
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So as I mentioned once before, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And as I also mentioned that last time, I won't really compare the President to a stopped clock, because he's not right anywhere near twice a day. But he did the right thing today, so he deserves credit. It doesn’t matter that he did the right thing for the wrong reasons; it only matters that it was the right thing. Hopefully, most of the children will soon be reunited with their parents.
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