Summer's End
Labor Day has come and gone, and while the calendar insists it isn’t Fall yet, summer feels over.
I’ve read that Labor Day is a “quintessential American barbecuing holiday,” though I’ve never celebrated it that way. This feels like such a missed opportunity, but also a relief as it’s possibly the sole American holiday I don’t associate with food.
For me, summer always carried the promise of something different, a break from routine, a chance for adventure or rest.
As a kid, that meant beaches, camping, and cookouts. As an adult, it meant juggling work with the chaos of kids’ camps and practices, the family schedule going pear-shaped until school finally steadied things again.
Now my kids are grown, and Brandy and I are free to spend summer as we please. No more carpools, no more pickup lines. And yet, even without those obligations, I can feel September tugging at me, pulling me back toward the order and rhythm I once tried to escape. Structure, despite the part of me that fights it, is still the warm blanket that wraps my life in order. September returns to whisper the same truth: freedom without boundaries will unravel into chaos.
We spent this summer on the West Coast, with no real schedule and only the desire to be outside as much as possible. But the other parts of my life suffered. My diet wobbled, and while I managed to avoid gaining weight, it was a far greater struggle than it is under my usual routine.
I caught myself playing bizarre internal games. On the East Coast, where I live most of the time, there are no good tacos (fight me). But I never wandered the New York streets mourning that fact. Yet during my ten weeks on the West Coast, I felt compelled to eat every taco I stumbled across, as though leaving without them would somehow harm my life. The irony is that when I actually lived in Los Angeles, I rarely ate tacos at all.
The dragon’s slipped a foot in the door! Now back in New York, I’ve caught myself daydreaming about a coffee table book of the city’s best tacos. It would be a very short book to be sure, but researching it would mean sampling every taco in town… this could become calorically catastrophic!
I get flashes of a harmony of sorts, washing over me, where after some—hopefully short—time spent back in my groove. My familiar gym, eating mostly at home, the familiarity of my local grocery stores. The familiarity of my gym. The effort will subside and I will be back in the swing of things. I’m looking forward to this.
I’m counting this past summer as a success. I strayed, but without real damage. Still, I know better than to relax into the illusion that this can become a new normal. That kind of accomplishment is a slippery slope. What I feel now is relief: glad to be restructuring my life, and grateful to have made it through with no real setbacks.
Maybe that’s all structure really is: discovering what works, and repeating it until repetition itself becomes its own reward.