Dog Days

Late August, summer’s winding down, and conventional wisdom has it that by now, the kids—and their parents—are pretty much ready for school to start and life to get on with itself according to the usual routine.

Not.

I could easily do with another three months of vacation and I’m sure the kid would happily go double that. Frankly, I feel like I’m just now starting to hit my stride (although it’s probably more of a stagger) when it comes to rest and relaxation; the real me—the one who can sleep until 10:45 in the morning—is only beginning to emerge.

There are still dozens of bike rides I’d like to take, lots of places I’d like to camp out, and at least four or five evenings on which I’d be into overindulging and waking up to regret what I’d done. Unfortunately, it’s already time to start reining in my impulses and commencing to behave, presumably while I still can backtrack now and again.

You can look up the origin of the term dog days—apparently, they’re even mentioned in Aristotle’s Physics—but I still like to believe it has to do with the way dogs lie around in the August heat. Our pet, Becca, pretty much spends her entire day these days curled up in the shade, except when someone walks by the house with an animal, at which point she raises her head and barks half-heartedly until owner and dog are out of smell-range.

It’s a delightful luxury, of course, to be in this position of having few enough responsibilities at the present time to appreciate the somnolent mood of these canicular days; and I’m not complaining; (for one thing, I’m too lazy to.)

I do kinda long for greater meaning and purpose in my life, though; and if it weren’t for my stronger inclination to doze in the shade and read Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, I’m sure I’d get right on it.