“Summertime….and the livin’ is easy….”
At least that’s the hope for those of us who have long passed experiencing the truly carefree summer days of our youth when “easy” was a given once excitedly exiting the classroom that last day of school. We knew another school year was coming but the horizon was distant and not something we gave much thought to till August when the days seemed to instantly get shorter and we began to get bombarded with previews of the fall TV season. Undiagnosed depression was likely more prevalent than publicized but we sucked it up and dealt with it for lack of any alternative. We were kids and there wasn’t much to be depressed about…we had no worries or responsibilities other than to survive random bouts of humiliation and stupidity and hope our favorite shows weren’t cancelled.
And that our summer didn’t end up sucking.
Out in the wild as a reasonably responsible and perhaps employed adult, summer takes on more importance despite knowing it would never be as free, with the trade being episodes of humiliation and stupidity being (hopefully) rarer occurrences. We have no choice but to embrace and enjoy it as we know even the perception of what summer allows is fleeting….the acceptability to ease up and take liberties with our time although it is insufficient reimbursement for the grind of the rest of the year.
My wife and I cherish summers. We’re both self-employed and put a lot of pressure on ourselves and look forward to easing up on the rush of life. With only rare exceptions we have been successful in accomplishing our goal of lots of beach and other leisure time as well as doing a lot of nothing, which for us still often enough entails something semi-constructive, like reading, eating too much, participating in too many happy hours and working out to try to keep weight off and stay sane.
We knew this summer was going to be different, perhaps even more difficult and demanding than the rest of the year given what was pending….one grandchild due in September, another in October, one kid buying a house in June with my wife running the renovation project and our other kid also doing renovations requiring her constant attention. All on top of my wife trying to do her “real” job while being the backup babysitter and me losing my mind trying to do my not so real job watching her head do 360s on her shoulders. And then capped with a planned trip to Florida to check on our elderly parents, to be scheduled immediately after the September baby launch.
It was going to be a deranged version of “Beat the Clock”.
But being the pros we are we came up with a not quite genius plan to ensure we still had some time, albeit not all the time we wanted or needed, to breathe. We took a ridiculously-structured and utterly unrelaxing vacation which we shoehorned into the schedule, concocted out of desperation to do something/anything before the shit hit the fan, returning the day after our son took possession of his renovation project. We had concerns the September baby might decide to launch in August, and with July totally out of the question, we had only that one specific week in June to run away and hide.
The renovations produced more agita than anticipated, not that anticipated agita means not much agita as there is no acceptable amount of agita. And much of the agita was generated by our kids…they’re the worst clients my wife has ever had but she has to be nice to them for some reason.
The two already existing grandkids traded off getting sick on a regular basis for weeks, requiring both of us to help out with babysitting, my wife bearing the brunt of it given my inherent lack of patience with little kids. Good thing my kids understand that, but despite that there were still two more en route.
It had been brutally hot and the diminished beach and leisure time was getting to us, but things began to calm down in mid-August so we decided to blow off the week before Labor Day and do what we do best…sit our asses on the beach, eat, drink and do some version of nothing. That was our new master plan to salvage the summer.
Then our daughter caught a stomach virus which created an emergency babysitting situation for my wife, but the virus made its way to the baby and then subsequently to my wife, who was just getting over a strange bout of laryngitis, creating a terrible one-day event the week before our week off. Then another emergency babysitting situation with the other kid who unbeknownst to anyone had Covid, so my wife then got that. But that was not a one-day event and there went our week and the last vestige of any summer chilling. Fortunately it has not been much more than a bad cold and I somehow have avoided it so far, but for good measure she also contracted a sinus infection along with the Covid which decided the best route to exit her body was by perforating her eardrum and bleeding out. So our week’s planned leisure activities were replaced by visits to doctors and pharmacies.
And our non-vacation to Florida might be in jeopardy if the infection doesn’t subside and her head doesn’t unclog, which would be the perfect grand finale.
Oh well…only eight months till next Memorial Day.
But the good news…there’s no school year imminent and all those cancelled shows are back from the dead and out there somewhere in the ether for my viewing pleasure if I choose to hunt them down.