a.k.a. V.J.

The calendar says that summer of 2024 ends on September 21. Tradition says it will end the day after Labor Day. For me, summer is effectively over on this, the evening of August 25.

Fall classes start tomorrow at SUNY Oswego, and I will be there on day one teaching a section of Integrated Marketing Communications. This day has been spent attending to small, last-minute details ranging from printing out an attendance sheet to tweaking my lecture PowerPoint to breaking out the jackets and ties. Everything about today has felt very much like the eve of a new season.

Our culture encourages retrospection and evaluation of summer in a way that it doesn’t for any of the other three seasons. Nobody has ever, on a day in late March, asked me if I had a good winter. But we are trained to look back at the summer months and assess how they went. I suppose my summer was “good” by the traditional metrics. I traveled, I relaxed, I read a lot, I hiked a small portion of the Appalachian Trail, I attended a big-league baseball game, I streamed a bunch of episodes of “Chico and the Man” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and no major negative life events occurred. I’ll take it.

Summer was nice but now it’s over for me and fading fast for everyone else. Aside from school starting, other harbingers have appeared. The local foliage is showing the first signs of rust. Football games are being played. Electioneering signs are popping up in yards. People on social media are either squee-ing over or jeering pumpkin spice, depending on what side of that particular cultural Mason-Dixon Line they reside. Spirit Halloween banners hang on decrepit storefronts across the land.

Turn! Turn! Turn!