Searching for summer

It’s June 9, and so far it feels like the most un-summery summer that ever (didn’t) summer. I wake up on June mornings, shivering and reaching for a hoodie, the same way I do on every other morning of the year, and although I’ve been swimming several times, I have to tell you that it’s not much fun because the water has been icy. Like cardiac event-inducing cold. Like break the surface of the water with an ice pick cold. I swam the very first day that the pool was open and afterward, it took me hours to warm up. That might have been a little bit of self-induced hypothermia, now that I think of it.

Like mostly every other place on the northern half of the Atlantic seaboard, we also had several days of smoky haze, the result of wildfires in Canada, which - look at a map - is NOWHERE NEAR HERE. At first, I ignored the warnings about the terrible air quality and took my usual walk on the track at the base, and then the next day I woke up feeling like I’d been attacked by every upper respiratory virus in existence. Scratchy throat, watery and itchy eyes, sneezing and coughing - I took a COVID test just to be sure but it wasn’t COVID. It was Canada. They need to get their forest fires under control. 

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It’s Saturday now, an early June Saturday, bright and sunny and warm, with a swim meet (time trials, but it still counts) in the morning and a graduation party in the afternoon and all seems right again with the summer world. It was cold this morning, cold enough that I needed to wear my team jacket while performing my refereeing duties. But I like my team jacket, so that was kind of a bonus. The water that splashed me as the swimmers dove in was freezing cold. Those kids are tough, I tell you. But the air is clear, the smoky haze all but gone. We’re on the brink of civil war and I still have to maintain vigilant situational awareness to avoid unwanted (is there any other kind) encounters with bears and coyotes, but at least one thing is normal. There’s no freedom like the freedom of a Saturday in June. 

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For weeks, every day  has dawned sunny and bright, though much cooler than I would like; and every afternoon has been just like the afternoon that surrounds me right now - balmy and nearly still, the trees just barely rustling, the skies a pale bluish pinkish golden glow, nothing but birdsong to disturb the peace. 

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Did I say that it hasn't seemed like summer? It's June 21 now, the first day of meteorological summer and it's raining and windy, which makes it feel like it's about 55 degrees.  It's 66 according to my weather app, so it's already stupid cold for June but the rain and wind are reminiscent of late October. I can smell the pumpkin spice. And I hate pumpkin spice. 

I also smell chlorine, because it's Wednesday night so I'm at a swim meet that should have been cancelled but wasn't because we're tough and we're not going to let a little rain and wind stop us, right? I feel like punching someone right now, but I won't. I'll just write about wanting to punch someone. That'll make me feel better. 

I'm wearing a hoodie and a rain jacket. So are all of the adults. The swimmers are in their suits, wrapped up in already wet towels, huddled under tents, hoping for thunder. "That was thunder, right? No, it was a plane." I'm all for an intrepid spirit of can-do gung-ho damn the torpedoes full speed ahead toughness but this? This is just crazy.  

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A day later, now a full day into official summer and it's still cold and raining but not as cold and not as rainy as yesterday. Things are moving in the right direction. Things are looking up. 

We finished the swim meet by 8 pm, cleaned the place up in record time and I was home in my pajamas with a cup of hot tea by 8:45 PM. That's the nice thing about being cold and wet. If you're lucky, you get to eventually be warm and dry and that’s a nice contrast. 

And so this crazy year continues, bears and coyotes roaming freely through the DMV suburbs (my neighbor scared the coyote out of her yard, where it was eyeing her chickens), wildfires raging and sending plumes of smoke thousands of miles south and east, boiling heat in Texas and early November weather in the smack dab middle of June here in Maryland. My youngest child graduated from high school and already attended his college orientation and we'll be packing him up to move out in no time at all. I swam last weekend but I think I'll be out of the pool for at least a few days. The water just keeps getting colder. 

Inviting the curate for tea

I cooked dinner last night. I do this all the time, and I suppose that’s why it’s worth writing about, because I do it all the time and what else should I write about except the things that I do every day? Anyway, this dinner didn’t involve a lot of cooking, so it would be more accurate to say that I MADE dinner. It was a Greek steak salad, so the steak, which I sauteed and sliced into thin, small pieces, was the only part that needed cooking; that and some store bakery naan bread that I toasted in the oven for a few minutes. 

It was a good summer dinner, very flavorful (kalamata olives and feta cheese make everything Greek, and everything Greek tastes good), easy, and healthy. But there was a lot of it. I had Greek steak salad for lunch today and I still have a ton of it left. 

But I also have some chicken that needs to be cooked today, or it will go bad. I worried a bit about this as I drove home from work. The salad needs to be finished today or it will go to waste but I have to cook the chicken and that’s what everyone is going to want to eat. What to do, what to do? 

To make a long story less long, I ate the salad one more time. The rest of the family ate chicken, and the chicken leftovers will still be good tomorrow. Everyone eats, and nothing goes to waste. This is the stuff that occupies my brain at least half the time, because this is the stuff that constitutes life. This is what being human is all about

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After two volumes of Bill Browder fighting with Putin, I needed a little peace and quiet, and so I returned to my now-beloved Barbara Pym. I’m not sure how I managed to live for over 50 years as an Anglophile and compulsive reader without reading Barbara Pym, but I am certainly making up for lost time. I’m right in the middle of the third novel of a three-volume anthology of Pym novels (A Glass of Blessings, Some Tame Gazelle, and Jane and Prudence) about genteel English ladies in the middle of the 20th century, ladies whose lives revolve around how to arrange the flowers in a manner that is artful but not too artful, and how to manage the complicated relationships with the domestic help, and what one should wear to the church picnic, and of course, what to serve the curate when one invites him to tea. 

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None of the ladies in this trilogy of novels has anything that even resembles a job, and the female protagonists of the first two novels (a rather spoiled married woman in the first and two “spinster” sisters in the second) also don’t have children, but they are busy from morning to night. Their households are managed with painstaking care, with every detail from food to flowers to cleaning and polishing to furniture placement to mending and laundry carefully planned and considered. When the curate or the vicar or the archdeacon come to supper or tea, there’s no danger that our hostess will feed her guest the same thing that he had the last time he visited, because she keeps a diary that includes details on who came to dinner and what was served. I’m not the best cook, but I have a small handful of recipes that I do well enough to serve to guests. It’s a very small handful. At my house, the vicar would get the same roasted chicken or chicken fried rice or turkey chili every time he came to dinner, and he’d like it because this isn’t a restaurant for crying out loud. I wouldn’t need to keep a list to keep track, is what I’m saying, but I do applaud the list-making impulse. 

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I read something about Barbara Pym, but I can't remember if it was part of an introduction to one of her books, or a journal article maybe? The former, I think, because I don't hang around the place reading scholarly journals. Anyway, her original publisher rejected An Unsuitable Attachment. It was the 1960s and apparently they thought that no one was interested in novels about English ladies and their clergymen and their housekeeping and gardening arrangements. Ridiculous, of course. After that, no one else would publish Barbara Pym’s work, and her literary career was all but over. But then in a 1977 magazine article, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both included Miss Pym on their lists of most underrated English authors, and she was in vogue again. 

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If you listen to people who don’t know what they’re talking about, then you might go into a Barbara Pym novel believing that nothing is going to happen. In fact, that erroneous assumption about nothing happening might cause you to avoid reading Barbara Pym altogether, and that would be a mistake. 

Read Barbara Pym, and you’ll find that things do happen. There’s no chaos or upheaval; at least not the overt, showy kind. At the end of a novel, a character might realize something about herself, and the reader will know that nothing will be the same for her after that realization. Or maybe the plainer and less vivacious of two unmarried sisters will receive the marriage proposal that the prettier sister expected, and the balance of power between the sisters will be altered forever. The things that happen in a Barbara Pym novel shake up just a few people, not the whole world. 

But before anyone gets shaken up, in all the events leading up to the quiet but cataclysmic change in a character’s heart and mind or in the relationship between friends or family members, Pym’s women will spend much of their time thinking about food and bed linens and shopping and furniture placement. They’ll think hard about whether to alter their old coat and wear it for another season or give it to the church jumble sale. They’ll worry about someone showing up for tea when there’s only a small piece of cake left in the pantry. They’ll check on the servants to make sure they’re not wasting the silver polish. They’ll be busy day and night. 

*****

During her time in the literary wilderness, Pym apparently considered changing her style, or trying to write about different kinds of characters and situations. But she didn't. She just kept working at her day job and biding her time. Maybe she felt that she couldn't write any other way, or maybe she knew that her stories would find an audience again because they're about the mundane, ordinary, routine, fascinating stuff that constitutes life. They're about being human.

Rules are rules for crying out loud

It’s 7 PM on a Thursday night and I’m on a Zoom call, which is exactly where I do not want to be. But it’s time to recertify as a swimming official, and even officials’ training is on Zoom now. 

This is my last referee / starter training clinic. I’ve been doing this since 2010 and have the training practically memorized now, but you have to recertify every two years and you can’t recertify without sitting through the training so here I am. 

The person who usually does this training is a lovely person, an older man who has been a swim official at every level up to national championships for many years. He’s not the trainer tonight, though. I hope he’s OK. I can hear his voice in my head as I look at the PowerPoint slides, the same ones that have accompanied this training for at least the last 13 years and probably longer. Many bullet points with many numbered and lettered sub-bullets. Each slide has at least four levels of bullets. 

A new development: Starters now say “Take your marks,” rather than “Take your mark.” This is because USA Swimming has adopted the practice of World Aquatics (formerly known as FINA) and the Prince-Mont Swim League follows USA Swimming’s lead. Now you know. 

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Every third word in this slide deck is enclosed in quotation marks. Quotation marks for emphasis are among my least favorite things. 

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My camera is on because they’re making us keep our cameras on. We also have to respond to poll questions that will appear at intervals throughout the training, just to keep us honest. It’s insulting, really. You’d think that they’d trust us to pay attention and not to sit here and write blog posts and text our friends who are also in the class and who are texting back. Insulting. 

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We’re running 23 minutes late at the halfway mark. 

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The thing is that you have so many other straight up legitimate typographic options for emphasizing text - italics, bold, underlining, even color - so why resort to the absolutely wrong and illegitimate use of punctuation for emphasis?

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I’m not the only one whose attention is wandering. One attendee is cleaning her kitchen. Several others are typing away and I will assume that they, like me, are not taking notes on the class material. Meanwhile, it is 9:08 PM. The call was supposed to end at 9. When you send a meeting invite for 7-9, you are absolutely obligated to end the meeting at 9. Maybe 9:05.

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The whole point of this thing, after all, is to teach people to enforce the basic rules of human decency and civilization. You enter the pool feet first during warmups. You touch the wall with two hands, simultaneously, at the turn and finish in butterfly and breaststroke. You don't misuse quotation marks. And you don't keep people on a Godforsaken Zoom call for more than five minutes past the appointed time. My God. 

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At least two of the more than 40 people on this call are actually lying down. Still on camera, pillows propped behind their heads - they are done and they don't care who knows it. Respect. 

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The class finally ended at 9 gosh darn 45 PM and not one second too soon. Let's just say that I was less than engaged at that point. I was texting with a friend who was threatening to drop some inappropriate comments into the chat just to shake things up and I offered her cold hard cash money to do it. She could have made bank, I tell you what. We're talking about one percent money. 

It's Friday now and I'm at a swim meet doing absolutely nothing official. I'm going to watch swimming and then I'm going to go home. Somebody else is going to have to wield the clipboard tonight.