Fleeting

It's late July, crape myrtle time, summer-winding-down-already time. We have the whole month of August of course but once the crape myrtle appears, we're on the slippery downward slope to fall. Pumpkin spice is about to rear its ugly head if it hasn't already. Bleak. 

The thing is that it's blazing hot, brilliantly sunny, intensely humid - central casting summer conditions, almost impossible to think about chill and sweaters and school and pumpkin bleeding spice. But the summer swim season is just about over now, our last one ever. Everyone is leaving town. Graduation seems years in the past. Even 4th of July seems like a distant memory. 

It's 5:30 PM on Friday, and I'm waiting for my hairdresser to finish with another customer. There is a stack of People magazines in the waiting area, including the July 10 issue with the OceanGate tragedy on the cover. Was it just weeks ago that the entire country was gripped by this story? And now it's also in the past, all but forgotten by everyone except the families and friends of the victims.

*****

It's Saturday morning now and we are sitting in our team area at the West Arundel Swim Club in Laurel, Maryland. It's the Prince Mont Swim League All Stars meet, our really really really last and final summer swim meet ever. 

It's tropical here, very warm and very humid at 8:50 in the morning. It rained last night and this place is like a swamp. We're all crowded together in our folding chairs under our team canopy, surrounded by the crowded team canopies of the 35 other teams in the league. Swampy, I tell you, and densely populated; a summer swimming tent city. IYKYK. 

We can't even see the pool from our spot. We secured a tiny standing spot on the pool deck, and watched our boys take 2nd place in the medley relay, way outperforming their sixth seed. We gave up our spot after that race so that other parents could watch their daughters in the girls medley relay, and we'll have to work our way back in there when it's time for butterfly and breaststroke and IM. Everyone gets a turn at the good viewing spots. That's just good manners. All Stars etiquette. We're all in this swamp together. 

*****

Our air conditioning chose yesterday,  one of the hottest days of the year so far, to take what I suppose it considers a well-earned break. And it wasn't so bad. Things cooled down considerably last night and I slept with the windows open and a ceiling fan on high and a crisp cotton sheet over my body, and it was fine. The guy is coming to fix the system today; or rather, he is coming today and we hope that he can fix it. If he can’t, then our very spoiled family will live with a few more days of discomfort. It’ll probably do us good, really. 

We saw “Barbie” last night, and we’re seeing “Oppenheimer” today. The line for popcorn was long and every seat in the place was filled, almost, and people even applauded. After the movie, my husband watched women’s World Cup highlights, our family room dark and quiet with the fan on high. We sat still to stay cool. This, too, is the most summery thing, a shared excitement over a movie or a sporting event or a news story; and then an abrupt shift in mood as the zeitgeist moves on to other things. July gives way to August and the mood transitions from peak summer to impending autumn. There will be a cool morning at some point; not just cool but close to chilly. There will be an evening sometime early in August when someone will lament that it’s only 8 PM and it’s almost dark. There will be a week in late August when every child in the neighborhood will show up at the pool right as it opens, and they’ll stay all day, squeezing every last drop out of the waning summer. By then, the place will be a riot of pink of all shades. The crape myrtle will be in full bloom. 

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Five years, give or take

I went to an Orioles game once, in 1998. It was just a random, late-season game. I’m not a particular Orioles fan but my then-boyfriend, now-husband was a huge fan, and he got tickets, and we went. It was fun in the way that all low-stakes baseball games are fun. The Orioles were not in contention for anything that year, so no one other than the most die-hard fans cared if they won or lost that game, but it was a nice night to sit outside and drink beer and eat popcorn and watch baseball with middling levels of attention. 

The game was not exciting but around the sixth inning, a buzz began to grow throughout the stadium. Cal Ripken Jr., who had the longest consecutive games played record in baseball history (a record that will likely stand forever) had not yet entered the game. Cal was nearing the end of his career and he was no longer starting every game as he did in his superstar early and mid career years. It wasn’t uncommon for him to sit out a few innings. But it was the bottom of the sixth inning, and Cal was nowhere to be seen. Was he just not going to play? Was he injured? Was he going to suddenly announce his retirement? The stadium grew more restless and the buzz grew louder, until Cal finally came out of the dugout at the end of the game, to formally announce what everyone had by then already figured out - he had decided that the streak had gone on long enough, and had chosen to sit out the game to end it that night. 

*****

We had a busy weekend. The very last summer swim meet at our home pool - the B Division championship - followed by a quick road trip to Avalon NJ to watch my son compete in the Murray Mile Ocean Classic. He did very well in both things, and it was a lot of fun. But it was hectic. The meet didn’t end until 11:30. We got on the road by 12:30 but the already-horrendous summer Saturday traffic on I-95 was made much worse by two accidents, probably about 40 miles apart from one another. By the time we checked into our fleabag (oh my gosh so terrible more detail later) hotel and dropped our stuff off, we just barely had time to get to the beach to watch the race, which started at 6:30. My son finished the mile in very good time, beating all of his friends who had also caravaned to NJ following the meet, and scored age group honors among the men. My sister and her husband had come to the beach, and so we went out with them and had a very good time. We collapsed on our (terrible terrible terrible) hotel room beds at about 11 pm, and left at 8 the next morning, while all the young people (who stayed at the beach for the day) were still asleep. It wasn’t until we were about 20 miles inland that I realized that I hadn’t written a single word the previous day. It wasn’t intentional; I just forgot. 

*****

I don’t know exactly how long my daily writing streak lasted. Looking at my blog entries, I see references to it going back as far as five years. So it was at least a five-year streak of daily writing. And when I say "daily," I MEAN daily. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, weekends and holidays included. I never missed a day until Saturday. 

*****

Are you thinking that it's stupid and shallow and clueless and solipsistic to compare my small-time daily writing streak for which no records exist and which I can’t even prove really happened to one of the greatest baseball achievements of the 20th century? Of COURSE it is. If I wasn’t clueless and (sometimes) shallow and (occasionally) stupid and (a little bit) solipsistic, then what would I have had to write about for five years? How would I have sustained that streak for as long as I did? 

*****

Well one way was to write everywhere and anywhere. Any time I had five or ten free minutes, I'd open Google Docs and just start writing. Now, for example - it’s 9:18 AM and I'm at work but our whole network is down and the IT people are trying to figure out what's wrong, and the rest of us are just sitting around waiting. Well, the rest of them are sitting around waiting. I'm using these spare ten minutes that might turn into hours to write about writing (or about failing to write). Saturday was just the last day of the old streak. It's Tuesday now and day 3 of a brand new streak. You can miss a day and still be a person who writes every day. See you in five years, give or take. 

Perfect

Swimming and books - that’s all I’ve been writing about this summer, with a few forays into overplanning for travel and irrational fears about encounters with wild animals. Well, maybe not entirely irrational, since we do have coyotes swanning about the place like they own it, and every suburban neighborhood in the United States now seems to have its own black bear. 

Other than the books and the swimming, I couldn’t think of a single thing to write about today, and I thought about skipping it, just breaking my years-long daily writing streak because once the streak is broken then I don’t have to think about it anymore. Plus, I wrote a ton for work today. PLUS, I have to take the minutes at the neighborhood association meeting tonight. That’s writing, I tell you. That should count. 

But it doesn’t count. According to my own self-imposed and pretty much meaningless rules, I have to write something non-work-related every single day. There’s nothing in the world forcing me to do this except my own knowledge that I’ll feel bad if I don’t. The streak is the one ball that I have managed not to drop for the last five or more years, and I’m going to keep it in the air just a bit longer. 

*****

This summer is passing with ridiculous speed. Summer swimming will be over - not just for the summer, but forever - in two weeks. Meanwhile, we have trips to Avalon, NJ and Buffalo, NY (quick overnight trips, swimming-related), Ireland, and Ohio (not until September, so maybe it doesn’t count as a summer trip). I’m still recovering from graduation. I have to plan an end-of-year banquet and make a program for the Divisionals meet. I have to polish and finalize the meeting minutes that I took last night. And I have a job. It all seems overwhelming, and just five days after we return from Ireland, we’ll need to take our son and all his stuff to college. 

I don’t want to do any of this, except for the Ireland trip. I want languid summer days of reading and swimming and losing track of time and eating tomato sandwiches for lunch and dinner. That is the big upside of this summer - our backyard tomatoes are plentiful and delicious. I can just step outside and pull a tomato off the vine, wash it, slice it, sprinkle salt on it, and then arrange the slices between two slices of toasted white bread spread with mayonnaise. Why would you ever want to eat anything else? 

*****

Have you ever participated in a cornhole tournament? That is some fun, I tell you what. Just after I finished complaining in writing yesterday, I changed and went to the neighborhood pool, where our first-ever annual cornhole tournament was about to kick off. 32 teams, 16 cornhole sets of varying quality, a picnic table where the tournament commissioner registered teams and assigned brackets, and then the bean bags started flying, just barely keeping pace with the trash talk. 

I did not enter the tournament, but I did play an exhibition round; my husband and me against our friends and neighbors. We wiped the floor with those suckers, and then I swam laps to cool off. At that point, the tournament had heated up considerably. The final four teams were tossing bags, and the buzz centered on three teams - our friends’ son and his girlfriend, my son and one of his best friends, and a pair of ringers who called their team “The Brothers,” though they did not appear to be related. They wore “Toss Like a Boss” t-shirts, and they were there to win. They even brought a cheering section. 

The Brothers eliminated their semi-final opponent, and entered the final against my son’s team, the Renegade Rogues, or something like that. Our boys got off to a rough start. Down 7 to 1, they appeared destined for a second-place finish. But the Renegades prefer to be on the right side of destiny, and they finished strong to win the match, the tournament, and the custom WWE-style championship belt. They posed for a phalanx of cell phone-wielding kids snapping photos, and walked out in triumph, the belt of victory held high above their heads. No one knows what happened to The Brothers, who made a quick escape. No one had ever seen those two guys before, and I suspect we won’t see much of them again until the next cornhole tournament. 

*****

Silly. Just so silly. But I had begun that day feeling sad enough that keeping my head up was a challenge, and I ended the day happy, knowing that I’d just been part of a perfect summer night. Like everyone else, I guess, I’d been hoping for a whole summer of perfect summer nights following perfect summer days, and it hasn’t quite shaken out that way, what with the annual spring mental health crisis hanging on until well into July. But a perfect night is a perfect night, and I’ll take it. I’m not greedy. Some people never get a perfect summer night. 

Wednesday

"Swimmers, take your marks." The "swimmers" is unnecessary, really. Who else would be taking their marks? A simple "Take your marks" is all that you need. It's probably a newly trained starter. She'll learn. Officiating a swim meet is like any other endeavor. Practice makes perfect. 

We're at a Wednesday night swim meet, at an old time DMV swim club, steaming hot on a July evening, the humidity so thick that it's palpable; the grass and trees and shrubs all just slightly overgrown and the whole place veering toward tropical wildness. IYKYK. 

Wednesday night "B" meets are a DMV swimming tradition. They are unofficial meets, an opportunity for swimmers to practice their weaker events. Loud, crazy, and loose, B meets are silly cheers and "swimming up" and little swimmers running around between events with dripping popsicles and giant slices of pizza. For the last 17 years, Wednesday nights in July were reserved for B meets. This is our last B meet ever. 

*****

I went home after work, just to change my clothes, because I didn't want to stand on the deck of a pool in which I'm not allowed to swim on a hot July evening in my skirt and silk blouse. And comfort aside, there is also the question of appropriateness for the occasion. A B meet is not a dressy affair. Even business casual is overkill at a B meet. But of course, once I'm home I'm going to try to get some things done. I am me, after all, and this house isn't going to compulsively clean itself. And I’m quick - I can vacuum, wash the kitchen countertops, and fold a load of laundry in 30 minutes. 

As I stood in the laundry room speed-folding, a moth fluttered by, and I panicked for a moment, wondering if he was a lone wolf moth or one of many. I really hate moths. Visually, they are relatively less disgusting than other insects (RELATIVELY), but I can't bear their frantic swirling and flapping. If they'd just stay still for a hot second, I'd have no beef with them but they can't stay still and so I can't stop swatting at them until they're out of my sight or dead. 

I swatted like a person possessed and the thing had brains enough to understand that I was seriously opposed to its existence in close proximity to me. It wisely removed itself from the immediate area and I went about my business. I finished the laundry, changed into B meet appropriate attire and was on my way. But I was also considerably creeped out and hyper aware of my surroundings, especially where bugs were concerned. And let me tell you that a swimming pool in a close-in DC suburb in July is no place for a person who is bothered by flying insects. The atmospheric conditions at that pool on Wednesday night can best be described by the word “swampy,” and it was a whirlwind of gnats, not to mention home to a mosquito population of malarial proportions. I spent the long evening swatting and ducking. And I didn’t even think about ticks until later - 3 in the morning, to be exact. 3 in the morning is when I always enter worst-case-scenario mode. I checked myself and my husband for ticks, and was this close to waking my son up and making him check himself, too, but my husband managed to assure me that this could wait until morning. 

*****

But back to the meet. I arrived about 20 minutes late, pulled into one of the last available parking spots and crunched across the gravel to the sound of between-heat music (Taylor Swift). I found my friends in our team area, an encampment of folding camp chairs and collapsible tents and eight million wet towels draped over every available surface. People remembered that it was our family’s last B meet. They congratulated us, and asked us what we’re going to do with our Wednesday nights in future summers. And I really have no idea. It felt a little sad. 

*****

Some people take some things far too seriously, including kids’ sports. Well, really, ESPECIALLY kids’ sports. Again - IYKYK.  The referee for this particular B meet seemed determined to run his meet in accordance with USA Swimming standards, and he dragged out every single call into a minutes-long discussion, causing repeated between-heat delays. For context, a normal B meet that starts at 6 PM should end by 8:30. Maybe 8:45. I finally had to leave this meet at 9 PM after my son’s next-to-last event, and it was nowhere near finished. I’m told that it ran until almost 10. And so between the gnats and the heat and the stupid unnecessary delays, our last B meet was kind of a drag. But that wasn’t such a bad thing, really. If the last B meet had been perfect, I’d have probably gone home crying. Instead, I just went home. One more Saturday dual meet, one last Divisional championship, and one last All-Star meet, and our careers as summer swim team parents will come to an end. 

The Years of Lyndon Johnson

I read Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, the first volume in the now four-volume Years of Lyndon Johnson series, in 1990. The second volume, Means of Ascent, had just been published to great acclaim, and so I read the first volume (which had been published a decade before, when I was still in high school and completely uninterested in Lyndon Johnson) and then immediately ran out and bought Means of Ascent in hardcover because I couldn’t wait - literally couldn’t wait - for the paperback edition to come out. 

When I first learned about this series, I think I recall reading that Caro, already famous for The Power Broker, his huge biography of Robert Moses, had intended to write a two-volume biography of LBJ. The first volume was supposed to cover his early life and his political career through his time in the Senate. Then the second volume was to cover his time as Vice President, President, and his last few years at the LBJ Ranch. But after writing about half of the first volume and finding himself nowhere near Johnson’s first term in the House, he realized that he might - just might - need a third volume. He published that third volume, Master of the Senate, in 2002 and as you might guess from the title, it covers Johnson’s Senate years but not his years as JFK’s Vice President nor his own presidency. 

Passage of Power, volume 4, was published in 2012. It covers the years 1958 to 1964, so it doesn’t even touch Johnson’s real presidency, only his interregnum year as JFK’s successor. A fifth volume is expected to cover Johnson’s one-term elected presidency and his few years in retirement until his death in 1973. On the one hand, the hugely eventful and consequential Johnson presidency from 1965 to 1969, not to mention Caro’s track record, would suggest that it might not be unlikely that Caro would break those last few years into two more books, bringing the series up to six. And I would be all in for this. On the other hand, he is already in his 80s and probably needs to wrap this up before he literally runs out of time. According to Caro’s Wikipedia page, he has about 600 pages of volume five in the can. Not sure if that’s enough to cover the 1965 civil rights legislation, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the assassinations, and the protests. Pretty sure it’s not. It’s been well over 40 years, about half of Robert Caro’s life, and it seems that he’s nowhere near finished with Lyndon Johnson. And so neither am I. 

*****

Back in the 90s, I tore through Means of Ascent and Path to Power. Means of Ascent, especially, just took over my life for days. I remember reading the pages and pages of exposition on the misery and poverty of the Texas Hill Country before electrification made life bearable for the Hill Country’s poor farmers and workers and housewives. As a young Congressman, Lyndon Johnson fought to bring New Deal rural electrification programs to the Hill Country, and was a hero to the Texas poor and working class for the rest of his life. Path to Power opens with the lead up to Johnson’s famous 1965 Voting Rights Act speech, two minutes that ended with the former Southern segregationist looking straight into the TV camera and echoing the words of the civil rights movement : “We Shall Overcome.” There is just no way for readers to understand the full significance of these moments in Lyndon Johnson’s political career and his place in the middle of the American century without knowing the full back story, and Caro doesn’t take shortcuts. He doesn’t spare a detail no matter how many pages - or how many volumes - it takes. 

I have no idea why, but I never got around to reading Master of the Senate, though I do have a hardcover copy that I bought at a library book sale. And until last week, I didn’t even know that volume four had been published, though that happened over a decade ago. 

That's the difference between my life when I first read Robert Caro and my life during the last 20 years. Not only did I have lots of time to read but I also had lots of time to read about books and think about what to read next. Understand, of course, that hindsight is 20/20. At the time, I didn't feel like I had lots of extra time. I was a young person with a job and friends, and I thought I was busy busy busy, from morning to night. But now I know that I had all the time in the world. 

Reading Robert Caro again now feels like a long summer day of reading when I was young, when I looked up from a page after an hour or three, a little disoriented, lost to the world in the middle of the 20th century in Washington DC and the Texas Hill Country. Lyndon Johnson was the American century itself, huge and consequential and so complicated that it literally takes volumes to describe. 

*****

Yesterday, I heard an NPR story about Robert Gottlieb, Robert Caro’s longtime editor, who died this year. Caro apparently continues to work on volume 5 of the series. I wish him good health and long life for his own sake of course, but like many other Robert Caro fans, I also want to see him finish this project, or at least to finish and publish one last volume. I’m going to go back and read Master of the Senate, even though I’ll be reading it out of sequence; and I might go back and re-read Means of Ascent and Path to Power again, too. I can’t imagine that anyone could understand Lyndon Johnson, and his place in 20th century American history in less than hundreds of thousands of words. I can’t imagine that it’s possible to make sense of him in anything less than four or five or six enormous volumes. And I can’t imagine that anyone else will ever write a biography even remotely like the Years of Lyndon Johnson series.