So, Saturday (09AUG2025) is a big family party at the Compound. Another grandson graduates from high school and begins college. The next, next generation become adults and have all the same decisions and experiences in front of them. And Camera Girl and I continue our campaign to get to play with progressively more distant descendants. The hunt for great grandchildren is now the thing.
But the main thing is that I’m just providing the infrastructure; the indoor and outdoor venue and the grill. The graduate’s parents will bring and cook the food and organize the kids’ activities and lifeguard the pool. I’ll just be one of the kids tomorrow. I intend to spend a portion of the event with my brothers talking about how passing the torch to the next generation feels for them. There has been a threat of putting on a Shatner-Khan adjacent event. Maybe put on one of his greatest hits. If it happens, I hope it’ll be “Terror at 20,000 Feet.” There can be nothing more definitively Shatner than that.
But I hope to spend most of the day eating burgers and dogs and potato salad and peppers and sausage. And then playing pool with the grandkids and shooting the breeze with family that I don’t see very often. This will be the last get together for the summer. And everyone is getting older and travelling even the modest distances between us becomes more challenging every year. So, these parties become more important.
I guess most of us are on the Trump train so there will be some Trump gloating going on. We’ll keep it sotto voce because even among my close relatives there are a few folks of the other persuasion. And I don’t see any need to start a fight. Family solidarity is more important than scoring political points at a party. That’s for sure.
A couple of days ago the goofy looking weather man on the Spectrum channel (my cable provider) told us that it looks like a very nice week with temperatures in the 80’s, low humidity and plenty of sun. But then, just to prove he’s a jerk he went into a little spiel where he defined just how much daylight we lose over the course of August. And just to show that he was intentionally spreading misery he finished off by saying, “But most people don’t like to be reminded of this sad fact.” What a creep.
But he’s right. The sun is lower in the sky. It’s cooler than a few weeks ago and the sun is down earlier than it should be. The leaves are starting to fall from the cherry trees. The vegetable garden is definitely looking worse for wear and the flowers are starting to exhaust. Last week the daylilies in the sheltered corner ran out of flowers. There are still some smaller ones (Stella de Oros and orange ones) but they’re not the same. The cone flowers will last a good long time but there aren’t anymore new flowers growing. The only flowers still to come are the Montauk daisies and the wolfbane in October.
So summer is wrapping up. The kids go back to school in two weeks and pretty soon the end of season Dunwich Fair with its First Selectman dunk tank (win at your own risk) and free werewolf neutering clinic will be upon us. Well, it’s time for the party and goodbye Summer 2025.
“A couple of days ago the goofy looking weather man on the Spectrum channel (my cable provider) told us that it looks like a very nice week with temperatures in the 80’s, low humidity and plenty of sun. But then, just to prove he’s a jerk he went into a little spiel where he defined just how much daylight we lose over the course of August.”
We don’t get to that point until well into October. Early August? These are known as the “dog days”.
I’d love to borrow some of that Florida weather sometime around February 15th. That’s the low ebb of life up here.