“Are you excited or nervous?” I asked my daughter. Of course it was a dumb question. Dads are legendary for dumb questions. Obvious ones. And no matter how many blank stares we get. No matter how many burning laser beams we get, we keep asking them. It was the first day of school. Second grade. The BIG time! On a whole new hall. In a big kid classroom. The seats are taller. When I sit in them, my back doesn’t creak and my knee caps don’t burst out of my legs. We were walking up the sidewalk to school. Parents all around smiled and said, “Welcome back! Just in time, huh? One more day of summer and I was selling little Johnnie to the gypsies!” You know, good stuff like that.
Signs that the end of summer is growing near
You can feel it slamming shut. Not the heat. Oh, no. Certainly not the heat. It keeps coming. Rolling up on you. Getting under your clothes. Taunting you — “Shrivel like a raisin, wimpy boy!” I’m talking about the end of the summer. It’s coming. The intense heat of August is one of the signs — that the slow days and the easy times are just about over. School is about to start. Holidays are on the horizon. The good life is about to pick up the chairs and put out the “Closed ‘til next season” sign. Have you noticed them? The signs? Here are a few I’ve been seeing: • My summer to-do list now stretches to two pages — Nothing says the end of summer like an unfinished to-do list. Mine is yellowed with this written across the top: “Complete before June … OR HEAT WILL KILL YOU!!!”
A final goodbye to my geriatric paper maps
I threw away car maps the other day. Maps! Threw them away. It took great strength and effort to do it. But they’re gone. They were buried deep down in the glove compartment. I had been searching for an air pressure gauge. Instead I found a year’s supply of fast food straws. Enough crumpled napkins to sop up Lake Erie. And maps. Lots of maps. Maps of St. Augustine. Maps of Florida. Maps of the southeast. Maps of the Civil War and of the Lewis and Clark expeditions. Maps of Kenya and the original map Columbus used on his way to the New World. It had a doodle of a sinking ship and a seagull with this note: “Hoping this wasn’t bad idea. Pickup milk on the way home.” Frustrated when I didn’t find the air gauge, I started stuffing everything back in. Including the faded, crumpled maps. Then I paused.
‘Teen Beach Movie’ and a little daddy endurance
So, I have seen the regular version. And I have seen the sing-along version. And I have seen the dance-along version. And if there was a smell-along or a 3-D interactive video game with hip-degrading properties, I’d probably have seen that, too. I have the songs stuck in my head. I have talked about my favorite characters. Hair styles. Outfits. Surfers vs. bikers. How makeup could stay on perfectly in summer humidity.