Note: This piece will be the last installment of Americana until circa August 26. May your season end on a pleasant note.
My summer—defined by the last day of faculty meetings for the 2023-24 school year on June 12 and the first day of faculty meetings for the 2024-25 school year on August 28—is 75 days long. As of today, I’m 85% of the way through it. I typically devote my mornings and evenings to writing work of some kind; my afternoons consist of household errands/tasks and a post-lunch stretch on my living room couch, followed by a trip to my town pool. As of today, I’ve made 45 visits, which has driven the price of my $154 senior citizen membership down to $3.42 per session. (These are the kinds of calculations I make while swimming laps.) I spend 10 minutes driving each way, about a half-hour swimming, and another half-hour or so at the snack bar, where I have a diet soda and chips of some kind while reading for pleasure. (Recent forays have included the 1749 Henry Fielding classic Tom Jones, a thousand-page thriller by Robert Galbraith, a.k.a. J.K. Rowling, and an Archer Mayor murder mystery set in Brattleboro, Vermont, where I spent my 35th wedding anniversary commemorating the luckiest break I ever got.) The best part of my day is emerging from the pool after completing what I consider a worthy workout.
I know, and envy, people—some of them in my own family—who can wake up with a day off and let it unfold in an unpredictably and leisurely fashion, something I can’t really do unless I’m taking a vacation away from home. I am privileged in that the work I do is largely of my own choosing, and can afford little to no remuneration for my labors.
The purpose of structuring my summer days is existential: an urge to shape the entropic flow of time. (This, in fact, is the stock in trade of historians.) For most people, such structure is imposed on us by the demands of making a living in a twelve-month cycle. But I am a teacher and, as such, have had a lifelong summer rhythm that most of us only have in our youth. This is the way I’ve become an old man. I count the days. And, amid a rhythm punctuated by a quotidian world of worry and hovering dread, savor them.
An utterly lovely reflection in the pool