Good morning.
Today is Labor Day, which marks the unofficial end of summer. As someone with a birthday in the first half of September I kind of resent that fact because summer doesn’t really end until September 22nd or September 23rd and the weather in the Northeast, where I grew up, is incredibly dope throughout the entire month of September. On Long Island, the real heads know that September is actually the best time of year to go swimming. (Though probably the real heads on Long Island would say that October is the best time to go swimming but that’s simply not true.)
I’ve been thinking about the general flow of summer. This is mainly because I now live in Austin, Texas and the summer has been historically hot. August didn’t bring any underlying sense of melancholy as it drew to a close. Instead, the temperatures simply continued to hover around 100 degrees. The summer was hot, got hotter, got even hotter, and remains hot.
But I’ve been on Long Island visiting my family for the last week and as soon as I was dropped off by an Uber at 11:30 PM at the house I grew up in, those bittersweet feelings of the end of summer took grip. The mornings and nights are cool and nearly crisp, while the days are still hot; the U.S Open is happening and the bright lights on the blue hard court at night tell me that school is starting, fall is starting and that everything will change; and no matter how good I feel at any moment, no matter how vivid and vibrant life is, there is this strange feeling that everything is about to end.
I was thinking about the flow of summer a few months ago when I had the urge to read Michael Chabon’s debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is probably my favorite Chabon novel and it’s probably one of the best books about summer that has ever been written—probably because that was part of Chabon’s intent: he modeled it after what he considered the two greatest books about summer that he’d read, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
All three of those books are extremely different, but each one takes place over the course of a single summer in the Northeast. (I guess technically Pittsburgh isn’t in the Northeast, but it seems like there’s no definitive answer as to where Pittsburgh actually is.) As Chabon has pointed out, summer offers a great natural structure to a narrative—there are three months that each serve as an act for a story. June is all beginnings and promise, July is all heat and things happening, and August is when everything turns, the coolness creeps in, and the slow end of everything begins.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is about Art Bechstein and what he does during the summer after he graduates from college. It’s about the group of friends he falls in with, the girl and boy he loves and makes love to throughout the summer, and about his relationship with his father and his family. And, I have to say, it still holds up and feels as fresh and relevant as I bet it did in 1988.
Every time I read it, Phlox, the girl Arthur sees during the summer, reminds me of the girl I was in love with during my first postgraduate summer. Maybe it's because she was the one that bought me the book and told me I’d like it. And his friends remind me of all the friends I clung to and admired during my senior year of college and those first few years after we all graduated and lived in New York together.
As I sit writing this the night before I send it, listening to crickets outside the open window of my childhood room, I can’t help but be thankful for all of the summers of my life and the way they moved and left their accumulated impressions on me. I’m thankful that novels can bring that all back up in me. It's been 20 years since I was 17 years old and 15 since I had to last had to worry about going back to school, and I’m a little bit embarrassed but still in awe of that fact that the way the air feels, the way the light looks, the smell and feel of cooling grass at this time of year, can still make me mourn all the things that did or didn’t happen in a given summer, can make all those ghosts of things that did or didn’t happen—once, some time ago—pass before my eyes.
The other night, I jogged down to a nearby beach and stood on a newly built boat dock. I looked down at a shoreline I’ve seen so many times in my life and couldn’t help but feel that all the things I had known and loved were ending, over, or just so completely old. I gazed at the water and thought about how, with each rise and fall of the tide, it threatened to wash all of it away: all of us, the people from my life then, our ghosts still there idling on a bit of rocky beach, sitting on the rocks, attempting to start fires, smoking and drinking, trying to kiss or go as far as possible.
And that water does wash it all away each day and each night. All of it is going and already gone. Everyone is where they are and who they are now. All of what was is what it will be and all of what was is now gone—wafted, blown, and washed away.
But maybe it all only starts again and is reborn next June.