It is only now, that our big Brother Summer has stopped hitting us
long enough for us to catch our breath and wipe the tears from our eyes
with the back of our hand
(we don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he got to us, but he knows anyway)
that we can begin to hope he will lose interest in this game
and soon release us to the calm, beneficent care of Father Fall.
Kate recently came to me to ask about an entry in her online calendar that she hadn’t put in. I had utterly forgotten about it, but when I looked at it, I remembered that about a year ago, I had, in fact, written it into her calendar and not told her about it. It read:
One year ago today, Lucy-the-cat threw up on your (closed, thank god) laptop. I cleaned it up and never told you. By now, it should be clear there was nothing to worry about! Enjoy!
And people say men are no good at communicating in relationships.
An awesome weeklong vacation last week up at our family cabin in Maine went off spectacularly well, save for Piper’s catching conjunctivitis partway through. If you’re wondering, I believe the word is derived from the Latinate roots “conjunctiva” (which is the pink membrane underneath your lower eyelid) and “itis” (which is the state of being irritated and issuing entire poached-eggs’ worth of mucusy blobs).
(Does mentioning a substance that came out of my child officially make me a parent blogger, now?)
One of the more pleasant pictures of Piper while ill, immediately after an eye-scrubbing.
Anyhow, four days of rotten sleep left the entire Hirsch family clobbered and susceptible to a hacking summer cold, just in time to return to New York City and watch all the sidewalks melt down to slag as a giant heatwave rolls through town. It’s around 11 p.m.; I worked from home today to avoid coughing on anyone at WNYC, and I feel like a horse ran over me today. I’ve had no appetite at all, though I forced myself to have a bowl of cereal and a handful of trail mix this afternoon. I’m about to go to bed, and it’s still approximately two thousand Kelvin degrees outside. My environmentalist side has required me to put the window a/c units on “economy” mode, and the cats are still melted down to little furry piles of butter.
Piper’s coughing herself awake in her room, which portends another rotten night’s sleep for all of us: Kate’s working overnight while Piper and I keep the home fires extinguished.
I called an Apple Store, just for kicks, to see how things were going during the launch, and if he thought they might have any phones ever. He described the line to me, the one outside of his store, as something like a human Möbius strip – a warping tendril folded in, a thing without earthly end.
"I'm looking at eternity," he said. "I can see the tail of The Beast."
Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 11 months:
