From picnic to pumpkin patch
My Seasonal Affective Disorder always jumps into high gear on the last day of summer. I have often noted that Labor Day weekend is the season’s three-day mourning period. It’s a wake for the last wakeboard ride. We go, instantly, from picnic to pumpkin patch.
Yesterday, I drove past a public pool, saw the dry vermiculite and concrete bottom, and got a little teary-eyed. It’s weird to me that they drain the pool the day after Labor Day when it stays hot until mid-September.
Summer used to start in May and run through the first few days of September, but now it starts in July and runs through mid-October. I don’t know if it’s global warming or if, over centuries of leap years, the seasons have drifted, kicked down the road like an old can of peas. When the heat does go off, it dips from the 70s to the 40s overnight around Oct. 15.
A few years ago, I remember a sunny 70-degree Halloween. I watched two neighbor kids melt in their respective Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger costumes that year. I suspect they each lost five pounds that night, but quickly regained it the next day, gorging on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Zagnut bars.
But I digress, like I do. Closing the pools the first weekend of September seems like a flawed idea, but when you rely on child labor to staff your operation, you’re going to lose them to high school, or possibly middle school. I was in the pool on a hot day in July, looked up, and saw some pipsqueak sitting in the lifeguard chair. I thought, “If I started drowning, there is no way this scrawny 98-pound weakling is going to pull me out of the water.”
Frankly, it would probably take a double girder overhead crane to get me out of the deep end.
It’s weird to look up at a teenager in a highchair and think he’s your best bet for survival if something goes wrong in the water. Thanks to iPhones, Minecraft, and Fortnite, most of these Generation Z kids have the attention spans of tsetse flies.
I would be mortified if I had to be rescued by someone who couldn’t write his name in cursive.
The only thing sadder than a ridiculously young lifeguard is a ridiculously old one (old being a relative term suiting the job description). The cutoff age is probably 25 to 30 (and I’m being generous). David Hasselhoff was the only man who ever pulled off “the-middle-aged-man-as-a-lifeguard” trick.
Over the summer on a beach trip, I saw a 38-year-old lifeguard. He had been out in the sun too long. He looked like my leather wallet: beaten up, wrinkled, and falling apart at the seams. Like my wallet, I don’t suspect he could hold on to any credit cards for too long. Lifeguards, like milk, have an expiration date.
Nowadays, you can catch me at the gym’s indoor pool until Memorial Day.