The cooler weather has screwed up my internal calendar, and the kids are headed back to school next week. Is summer over already?
It seems to me that summers are shorter these days. Maybe time is just flying by quicker as I get older.
When I was a kid — way back in the previous century — summer was three solid months long. All of June, July and August. The traditional Memorial Day to Labor Day thing.
Maybe summer simply felt longer back then. We'd get out of town for vacation for a week or two, but otherwise there wasn't much to do except hang out and play with your friends.
I remember doing Little League baseball a couple of years, and we joined a pool when I got a bit older.
Otherwise we didn't seem to have many organized activities, not like kids do today, so perhaps the summer dragged along day after day after day — in a good way.
Does summer really end in mid-August now? How did this happen?
August was always known as the dog days of summer, the hottest and most humid month, the time when everyone seemed to take their vacations and everything just slowed down. I always fantasized about living the European life of taking the entire month of August off and spending it at a beach home. It never quite worked out that way.
August doesn't seem slow any more. I did get out of town last weekend to visit my brother and his family on a lake in North Carolina, but I used up my "official" vacation back in June. So there's no escape plan.
It's nowhere near 100 degrees in the Ohio Valley. We even slept with our windows open the past few nights!
Football is in the air, with the Bengals playing a prime-time preseason game against Green Bay the other night. And baseball — at least in these parts — is just about done as the Reds sink deeper into last place and trade away fan favorite Adam Dunn.
At CityBeat World Headquarters, someone brilliant (not me) moved our Annual Manual to August from late December, meaning we're in the midst of compiling a 100-plus page guidebook around the weekly issues. We're already planning our Cool Issue fall guide and wrapping up details on the MidPoint Music Festival, our first time producing the huge September event. And now a new school year looms.
Again, where did the summer go? When exactly were the dog days? When was the slowdown?
There are still some people who keep the spirit of summer alive, like my brother-in-law and friends who are teachers and do project work during their summer break while kicking back a bit. Every summer I find myself wondering why I didn't go into teaching.
Instead, I'm in a business that orbits around and dances with the events of the day, from what's already happened to what will happen in the near future. And the dance never stops because our lives, our home town and our events never stop. Even in August.
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