September Rain
Leaving Cape Cod
High tide. New moon. Rain. No wind. The tide comes in on Cape Cod Bay no matter what happens in Texas, in Afghanistan, or whatever I do. I went to check on it today. It was right on time.
The crowds are gone from the beaches. The cars are gone from the roads. COVID has closed many of the restaurants, as half the people don’t want to go inside, and there are few people who want to wait on them. It’s calm and beautiful, but pervaded by feelings of loss and melancholy. My daughter left last week, crying all the way home, as she has for the last thirty-six years. Summer is over. Vampire Weekend even wrote a song about it.
I wrote elsewhere about how strange and difficult this summer has been. The world has not experienced a summer with so much intense, destructive weather for a long time. Storms, fires, droughts, floods, and tornadoes have affected almost everyone, everywhere on the planet. It is possible that Mother Earth has not had a season like this since “the little ice age” around 1300, or perhaps not since the “great dying” about 25 million years ago. I’m not an expert.
What is clear, from watching the tide come in, is that Earth will survive. That does not mean that Cape Cod, or humans, will long be in existence. Given the behavior of many humans this summer, it seems that many people, for reasons that remain mostly unclear to me, are willing to take unnecessary risks with their futures, and those of their children. Their behavior also poses a risk to my health and wellbeing. Reading about, or watching that kind of behavior on TV, cuts through the meditative feelings of melancholy and adds a streak of anger and confusion.
I don’t like feeling angry and confused because too many people acting like suckers and dupes, and are getting sucked in by lies, threats, and false promises. I have enough to deal with without that added aggravation. The good thing is that, after three days of a cold and almost three weeks of a cough, I have recovered. I can breathe and my powers and resiliency have returned. I am ready to don my Super Hero cape and stomp out evil, fight the windmills, and right the wrongs of the world. Of course, in the confusion, I have misplaced my cape.
What makes that more distressing is that even though I am two years younger than Joe Biden and three years younger than Bernie Sanders, I do not have the power of the Presidency, nor am I a member of the US Senate. Sadly, it seems that even they may not have the leverage to get even half of what they need to be accomplished. So much has gone awry.
Yes, soon I will cross the bridge and reenter the routine of my semi-structured life in retirement. I will teach and take some “old-age” courses. I will foist my cynical views upon a virtual gathering of equally jaded, over-educated, opinionated, older folks, who are willing and eager to point out the gaps in my information and the flaws in my logic. I am looking forward to that. Many of these people have had illustrious careers, doing all kinds of things, and they know a lot of stuff.
Also, I will re-inject myself into the lives of my grandchildren, more because their parents need some relief than that the children are begging to see me — unless it’s to take them for ice cream. I will attempt to moderate their attraction to electronic stimulation, even though I realize that they will be needing many of the skills they learn from using those devices. Still, there is a real world out there that they need to appreciate and understand. And so far, I have retained my ability to keep their attention for at least seven minutes at a stretch.
Summer is over. I may swim in the bay one more time if the sun is out tomorrow. After that, we will drive over the bridge to reenter society. I will continue to attempt to push the world in the right direction, and try not to be discouraged by having to set realistic expectations — it was about two years ago that I was going house to house, hoping to convince people to vote for Elizabeth Warren. Those results were typical of many of my struggles.
I will be trying to choose my own future, as well as influence the futures of my children, grandchildren, community, country, and world. Hey, why stop now? I encourage you do the same.
To quote Chris Smithers:
“I’ve got plenty left I’ve set my sites on/
don’t wait up, keep the lights on/
I’ll be home soon.”
