The summer wind blows out of town
This is a message for all the kids in Upper Darby School District. I feel your pain. Yes, summer is over. Oh, I understand the calendar tells us summer doesn’t officially end until Sept. 22. Try telling that to all those kids who slogged back to school last week. It used to be schools never kicked off a new calendar year until after the unofficial end of summer. That would be Labor Day. Pardon me if celebration.
I have nothing against a three-day holiday. And I certainly have no beef with a day dedicated to heaping praise on workers.
I’m just not in the mood to celebrate. Could that be because I spent the first part of the day staring at the screen on my laptop? Maybe. Hey, we mean it when we talk about this 24hour news cycle. Too bad we don’t staff for it, aside from gullible editors who can’t stand the thought of a website that has not been updated.
But that’s only part of my problem.
My real that.
It’s not just the end of summer. It’s not the thought of how happy I was back on Memorial Day weekend, with the entire summer lying ahead.
It was not my personal highlight of the summer – seeing my son tie the knot with the love of his life – even if I had to drive to someplace called Jennerstown, Pa., to do it.
And was it really just a few weeks ago that I was plopping my behind in a beach chair firmly ensconced in my favorite place on Earth. That would be Rehoboth Beach, Del. No, it is issue I
today. don’t is join bigger the than not the same town I used to visit as a kid. It still holds a very special place in my heart, no matter how much they trash up the Coastal Highway.
I started to feel this way last week, when I arrived home last night to deal with something I usually don’t have to worry about – at least not in August. My nightly routine is to get out of my shirt and tie as fast as I can, throw on a T-shirt and shorts, and head for the back deck. That got interrupted last week by a most unwelcome visitor.
It was cold. What happened to the Dog Days of August? This year it seems like they decided to chill out. Remember, I am that odd bird who actually likes humidity. The hotter, the more humid the better. Maybe I should move to Texas, if so much of it were not under water.
Of course, all of this is prelude to the real reason I dislike Labor Day. Yes, it signifies summer is over.
But is also signifies more important.
It reminds me I am another year older.
For some reason, I was not fazed in the least by a couple of other milestones. I breezed by 40 and 50 without so much as twitch.
But I’ve discovered 60 is a bit of a different animal. Why does it sound so much older than 59?
I thought this would pass. It hasn’t. I turned 62 on Friday. I’m not thrilled.
Sure, I like the senior discounts at the golf course, but I still like to walk, as opposed to being mandated to take a cart.
I no longer sit on the curb waiting for dad to get home with the one birthday gift I prized more than any other. That would be a full box of Topps baseball cards.
What happened to all those cards remains something of a family mystery. My guess is at some point mom probably threw something a them out. If I still had could probably retire.
Retirement is not exactly the “cards” these days.
At least not by our choice. If you have not noticed, these are very trying times in the newspaper racket.
We are at war with ourselves, trying desperately to gain traction in a new digital market while seeing the bridge that holds all this up – our prized print editions – burning.
Reading a daily newspaper – in print – is something more and more people simply do not do anymore.
Like everything else, much of that information is now gleaned by people on their phone.
Take this test the next time you climb aboard a trolley, or a regional rail train. Notice something different about all those people getting on with you. A few years ago many of them carried newspapers in their hands. Now all they have is their phone, them, I in laptop or tablet.
Remember when people used to sit in the food court at the mall and actually speak to each other? Glance at them now. Every head is buried in their phone. That’s particularly true of young people.
I fear for what is going to happen when those print editions go away.
I have been referring to the past few months as the “summer of the pipeline,” in part because of the amount of time, manpower and space we have devoted to what I think is the biggest issue in Delaware and Chester counties. That would be Sunoco Pipeline LP’s massive Mariner East 2 project.
And yet at a meeting in Middletown, many residents said they were dismayed to see and learn about what was happening in their neighborhood, as if the story had taken them by surprise.
How much to do you think is going to slide by when the newspaper is not there to act in its traditional watchdog role.
I hope that young people, those who are going to inherit this mess of a landscape we have created, are paying attention.
I hope they see more than just the 140-character staccato bursts that arrive on their phones.
I hope that delving into these kinds of local issues is not just something that “old” people do. I know all about old. It’s staring at me in the each day.
So long summer. As always, you came and went too fast. mirror