Is it really August already?

I woke up this morning feeling wistful. It’s the third week of August. Where did this summer go?

I have not ridden my bike even once (there are giant construction trucks all over my favorite route). We’ve hardly entertained friends at our Bistro (the apron of the garage that I painted last year). We’ve not traveled other than to see our kids. My six tomato plants are producing an unenergetic number of tomatoes. Didn’t see the Perseids. Didn’t serve umbrella drinks by our pool. Oh wait, we don’t have a pool.

Unvaccinated people (by which I mean people who COULD be vaccinated but haven’t yet) made being out and about a lot harder for the rest of us who are rationally nervous about getting or transmitting Covid. It’s been hot and humid since May; Mark Baden (local weather guy) said we have had 35 days in the 80’s and 17 days in the 90’s. We aren’t making our whininess up; it’s been hot and we are not ferns. (Except for Franc, who’s heritage is Puerto Rican, who says this weather is fine, just fine.)

Still, I feel guilty and wistful, as if I have not lived up to the promise of summer.

I blame the media and my gullibility. I’ve absorbed too many marketing campaigns of people jumping in pools, wearing sleeveless dresses on party boats, eating ribs at a party. Too many messages about happy people being happy because they are doing happy summer things.

I decided, just this morning, that the proper response to my wistfulness is not to scurry around and do stuff and check things off a “Do This This Summer” list. No, the proper response is to keep living my life.

Because frankly, I’m pretty happy. Sometimes one needs to remind themselves that life feels good even if we don’t have a speed boat or flowy sundresses or matching plastic outdoor platters.

Air conditioning and books and streaming shows and two lazy cats and family in the house can make a fine season … as long as I define it instead of marketing campaigns.

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Speaking of Book and Movies

Two years ago I started reading mysteries and I now love the genre when written by good writers. I especially love the library because I can try any writer and if I don’t enjoy the book – this happens plenty – I just return it. But when I find a good author a path opens and I go down it as far as it will go.

I’ve previously mentioned William Kent Krueger. I read all seventeen of his Cork O’Connor novels; all set in Up North Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan. Pretty much everything I now know about Anishinaabe culture I learned in those books, or I looked up later because I became curious. I’m not all that crazy about Krueger’s not-Cork books, but he has a new mystery in that series coming out this fall and I already have it on order at the library.

I read three Abir Mukherjee novels in about five minutes and, why yes, I have a library hold on his next still-unpublished one. One of the two detectives is a white British guy who is a WWI vet with PTSD and an opium addiction. The other detective is a brilliant young Indian man who works hard to straddle his own culture while learning and moving in 1920’s Colonial British India. There’s a lot going on in these novels, I respect that racism is addressed in non-sentimental ways.

I just discovered Andrew Taylor, who has written a bazillion books so basically, I shouldn’t need to come out of my house til Christmas. Curiously, I tried one of his first books and couldn’t get past the first couple of chapters, but the Marwood and Lovett series I’m in now has me hooked; the mise-en-scene is the Great London Fire of 1666. I like when characters who pursue honest answers become, almost against their will, become more open minded and accepting. I like living in a world where smarts and reluctant kindness carry the plot.

Which also explains why I like S.J. Sansom so much. Sharklake is a 16th century lawyer with a humpback so much of his society either patronizes or ignores him. I love a well written, well researched novel where the character talks with Elizabeth the (probably not so much) Virgin Queen from time to time.

S.J. Parris is a woman who writes in the first-person guise of Giordono Bruno, a 16th century Italian monk kicked out of his order for reading too much and too widely. Bruno has to live by his wits after that and ends up living in and operating from the French embassy in London. I’ve only read ‘Sacrilege’ so far, but I will be reading more.

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This past week Len and I got around to watching 2012 movie, Searching for Sugar Land. The movie revolves around Sixto Rodriguez, a poet and musician in Detroit in the 1970’s. None of us ever heard about him, but a pirated copy of his album mushroomed in South Africa, where to this day his music is popular and loved. I won’t tell you more, because if you don’t happen to know this film – watch it. It was so amazingly good on so many levels and it made my whole week better. Powerful story.

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And that brings me to Seeking You, a Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke. This is the book I mentioned when I was writing about loneliness last week.

This is a nonfiction graphic book. Graphic books are new to me (since Archie comix books, anyways) It’s powerful to read one or two strong thoughts on a page, the background being a dark drawing of people, or headlines, or buildings, or paths. She surrounds her thoughts with the mood she wants to impart to the reader, the background is half the message.

Radtke starts by explaining the title, Seek You. “In amateur radio, operators call out across frequencies with a series of punctuated monotone beeps known as “CQ call.” .. over time English speakers took it to stand for “Seek You.” A C.Q. call is a reaching outward, an attempt to make a connection with someone you’ve never met.”

The book asks us to consider American loneliness and our loneliness. It is so brilliant that occasionally I spoke out loud to the book. She did research, she considered her own life and that of others of her generation and ours.

Loneliness is so unwelcome to humans that we have made it our enemy. We are afraid of it, sometimes disgusted by it, we regard it as a sign of failure. We have learned how to arrange our lives and our thoughts and our sense of who we are and how we think – in order to be able to tell others and ourselves that we are not lonely.

We have made loneliness the pariah state of unsuccessful humans – instead of acknowledging that being alone is our first truth and will be our last.

If you read this book (it only takes a few hours) and then watch Search for Sugar Land, I almost guarantee you will have to go away for a few hours or days on a retreat just to put yourself back together.

That’s all I have today.

I didn’t go on any picnics this summer. I didn’t win any tennis matches (I don’t know how to play tennis). I have a mild tan from walking to the Y and back just to keep my muscles from seizing up.

I have spent so much time in 16th century London that I sort of know what the Thames smells like when the tide goes out. Particularly if a dead body is revealed.

And I am once again rearranging how I think about what it means to have love, Len, my family, friends, a community. When they are balm and when I am just play-acting for the sake of what we do when we are not intentional.