On Saturday morning, I was standing on a pool deck waiting for a race to begin as Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” blared from the announcing table’s sound system, and it felt like 2012 again.
2012 was a nice summer. The company that I was working for at the time eliminated our entire division in the middle of June, leaving me unemployed; and if you have school age swim team kids, summer is a good time to be unemployed. My kids were 11 and almost 8. We went to swim practice twice a day, with meets on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. We went to the library every week, and we went to museums and the County airport, where we watched planes take off and land while eating grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries at the airport lunch counter. We did a lot of hanging around. Kids that age are great company and a lot of fun to hang around with. The hanging around part is what I remember best about that summer.
My sons are 24 and almost 21 now, but now it’s their cousins’ turn to continue the summer swim team tradition, which means that I still get to go to summer swim meets, but I don’t have to show up early, nor stay late, nor judge stroke and turn infractions. My nephew is 12 and my niece is 8, and they are both very good swimmers. They’re also very good company.
*****
Today is July 1. July is the real heart of summer, especially in Maryland and the rest of the Mid-Atlantic states. In Maryland, school ends in June, and it starts in August, making July the only month untouched by school unless you count the back-to-school advertising that begins on July 4.
Last night, I left work at 5. It’s a holiday week, and traffic was blessedly light, and I resolved to go swimming the moment I got home so that I could avoid the threatened thunderstorm. I arrived home just before 5:30 and I was in the pool swimming laps by 5:45. The swim team was on its annual Hersheypark trip, and so the pool was not as crowded as it normally would have been at 5:45 PM, and the air was muggy and hot, and the water was just barely cool. The sun was shining brightly, but a few clouds looked threatening, and the atmosphere felt volatile, like a storm could break open at any minute. A little rain fell, even as the sun was still shining on the water - ideal swimming conditions. Then I came home and pulled some tomatoes off the plants in our garden and sliced them up for salad. The house was peaceful, and the cool of the water stayed with me for hours. It was as perfect a summer evening as I could have asked for.
*****
Or it would have been. Today is July 2. The new budget bill, the one that’s going to take food away from hungry children, passed the Senate yesterday, right around the time that DHS and their henchmen in Florida cut the ribbon on a brand-new concentration camp in the Everglades. The place, which they’re gleefully calling “Alligator Alcatraz” but which I will only refer to as the Ochopee Concentration Camp, has already flooded on its second day of operation. So that’s fortunate, I suppose - the people imprisoned there will die of dysentery or typhoid or malaria rather than being eaten by alligators or strangled by pythons. A somewhat cruel fate instead of a hideously cruel fate.
And that’s the thing that’s bothering me - that's what's wrong. It’s the cruelty of right now, not the nostalgia for a relatively peaceful time over a decade ago. Even garden tomatoes can’t make this right. Even a swim can’t wash away the sadness. For the first time in my life, I have problems that summer cannot solve.
