Uptown problems

It’s the next-to-last Friday in August and autumn is coming, whether I want it or not, and I don’t. I worked from home today, the first day in a week that the daytime temperatures fell below 90, and I listened as the rain pounded my roof, drops falling faster than my hands move on the keyboard (and they move pretty fast). My younger son’s high school orientation is next Thursday and then school starts on the day after Labor Day. We still have a few days of summer to cling to but it’s slipping away.

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I try to swim almost every day in the summer, but during the last few days of August, swimming becomes an act driven by desperation. If it’s August 23, as it is today; and I have a choice between swimming and almost anything else in life, then I will swim because time is running out. Yes, I can swim indoors all year round if I want to, but it’s not the same. It’s not even close.

It rained all day so I never did get a chance to swim, but tomorrow is another day.

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I was right about tomorrow, which is now today and is in fact another day, but completely different from yesterday. It’s Saturday, bright and sunny and at least 20 degrees cooler than it was two days ago. I’m still going to swim, because the water will still be warm and because I’d swim even if it wasn’t.

It’s Saturday, so I really have no idea what’s going on in the world. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that there’s no way to consult any news source without violating my weekend Trump embargo, so whatever is happening on the world stage right now will have to wait until Monday.

WIth current events off limits for now, I’m continuing to read Postwar. Normally, I finish a book in a few days, but this one is quite long. One of the things that this book has made me think about is how many of the things that we think of as history or tradition or culture are incredibly fleeting and short-lived. Things change so much in the course of a hundred years; and while a hundred years is a long time in one sense, it’s just a single human lifespan, give or take. My great-grandmother lived to age 106. My grandmother will be 96 in December. American constitutional democracy has been around for over 200 years, but what we think of as the American way of life is a product of the last 70 years. Almost everything is temporary. Practically nothing lasts forever.

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Except winter. Winter lasts forever. Is it too early to start complaining about winter when it’s still August (Sunday, August 25 to be exact) and it’s sunny and bright with temperatures in the low 70s?

No. It is not too early at all. August high temperatures in the low 70s are the slippery slope (Trump didn’t invent that expression) to autumn, which is the even steeper slippery slope to six months of winter. Yesterday, the pool water was still almost warm and I had a lovely swim with a short sharp shock of cold air at the end. Last night the temperatures dropped
into the 50s, and today is the kind of day that pumpkin spice latte drinkers dream about all summer long: cool, breezy, with low humidity--the worst kind of day for outdoor swimming.

You know what? It’ll be bracing.

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I’ll get there eventually. Meanwhile, my son and I are watching “Any Given Sunday,” a movie that I haven’t seen or thought about for a long time. I like this movie, probably more than any other Oliver Stone movie. My husband disliked it because of the fictionalized football league and teams--he thought that Stone should have paid for licensing rights to use real NFL teams. I disagree. I think that the stylized versions of NFL uniforms and the predator team names lay bare what professional football really is, without the veneer of family and inclusiveness that the NFL is always trying to impose on it. Professional football and the whole one-percent corporate edifice that supports it is a simple matter of strong vs. weak; and strong always wins.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about right now. I feel for John C. McGinley’s character, the blowhard broadcaster. There’s a lot of pressure in talking or writing for a living. You have to churn out a lot of words in a day, and not all of them are going to be good. Not all of them are even going to make any sense.

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It’s Monday now and I’m all caught up on current events. And even though it’s still August, it stayed in the 60s all day today. It was cloudy when I got home, with a breeze that made it downright chilly. The water was cold yesterday (I did finally swim) and I knew it would be much worse today and I didn’t have the heart to get into a cold dank pool on an October-looking night. It feels like summer is a rug that’s been yanked out from under me without so much as a by-your-leave. I went for a walk instead. It was fine.

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It’s Tuesday, so there's less than a week left of real summer. It was a few degrees warmer outside today; still unseasonably cool and overcast, but the air was still and soft and humid and the sun was trying to break through the heavy cloud cover. I came home from work and grocery shopping, and my whole body yearned for a swim. The air was just warm enough and really, i thought, how cold can the water have gotten in just two days.

It was freezing cold and glorious. I swam laps and wrapped myself in a towel and went on my way rejoicing, having snatched summer from the jaws of winter. It’s not over yet.

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OK, so maybe it’s over. It’s Wednesday night, 8 PM, and I’m working on a proposal (well, I was until a minute ago, and I will again in another minute) and tomorrow morning, I’ll take my younger son to his high school orientation. It’s a half-day, and then he’s off on Friday and for the rest of the weekend until school starts in earnest next Tuesday. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--the moment I have to drop a child off in front of a school building in the morning, and then wade through the pile of paperwork that will come home with him in the afternoon is the moment that summer is pretty much over.

I almost forgot to write something today because proposal deadlines wait for no one. This probably isn’t how I should be spending my time right now, but writing (like swimming) is one of only many things that I’m compulsive about. A 4 pm thunderstorm curtailed my swimming plans, which is just as well because I have a proposal to write. Hasta manana.

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And now it’s manana, meaning Thursday. I’m knee-deep in proposals, but that’s a big improvement over yesterday, when I was neck-deep. And speaking of deep, I also got to swim again today. The pool was even colder than it was on Tuesday, and I impressed myself by slipping right into the water without a moment’s hesitation. I didn’t have much time, and every minute I spent trying to steel myself to the cold was a minute that I wouldn’t have have been swimming, on one of the very last swimming days of the summer. Four days to go and I plan to immerse myself in that icy water on every single one of them.

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“I got uptown problems, and they’re not really problems at all.”

Brad Pitt’s character says this to his daughter in “Moneyball,” a movie that my 14-year-old son and I will watch any time it’s on. It was on last night, so of course, we watched part of it.  It’s Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, and I’m almost finished working, and I’m gearing up for the three-day celebration (for other people) and period of mourning (for me) that is the official end of summer. Yes, I know that summer doesn’t really end for three weeks, but Labor Day is the end of summer for those of us who define summer as no school, no bedtime, and no day complete without at least a short swim. It’s my least favorite weekend of the year, but that’s an uptown problem, isn’t it? There are lots of good things about fall if you don’t count pumpkin spice latte, and as soon as I finish complaining about the end of summer, I’ll figure out what those good things might be.

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It’s Labor Day now. I’m writing something else so I worked on that on Saturday and Sunday. And now I’m back to lamenting the end of summer. And I’m doing other things, too. I mean, I don’t sit around and bitch all day long. That you know of.

Labor Day is a combination holiday and prep day. Now that everyone is back to school again, I need to get things ready. Lunches and breakfast and dinner and clothes and supplies and stuff. They’re actually old enough to do all of that themselves. And they do all of it themselves. It’s just that I feel that I still need to oversee and supervise and coordinate. I like being needed.

It’s 11:50 AM now. The pool opens in ten minutes, so I’m going to do some stuff, and then I’m going to do some more stuff, and then I”m going to get out of the house and stay out of the house until 9 PM. And then tomorrow, it’s officially fall. And that’s not the best thing, but it’s not the worst thing. It’s an uptown problem, and that’s not a problem at all.