But now the days grow short/I’m in the autumn of my years/And I think of my life as vintage wine/From fine old kegs.
— From the song It Was a Very Good Year, written by Ervin Drake
Another solstice come and gone. It brings to mind a conversation I’d often have a long time ago. “June,” I used to tell my young son, “is like the Friday night of the year. July is Saturday and August is Sunday.” He got the drift immediately.
At their outset, weekends and summers can seem endless. When the longest day finally arrives on the calendar, time stretches far into the wild blue, way out of the field of vision. (Ironically, that’s especially true for the young, whose eyesight is usually sharpest of all.) By mid-July, you can just make out the end of the party on the distant reaches of the horizon, as pressure and reality slowly come into view. And by late summer, time is in your face. Most of us are steeling ourselves to be serious again, preparing for a cutthroat pace that won’t let up. The yearly weekend is winding down, and an uneasy desperation creeps in. There is homework to anticipate. There are schoolbags to pack. There are clean and formal clothes to be laid out for tomorrow. We expect no rest until we all take a breather around the Christmas holidays.
Of course, many of us who were hatched around mid-century managed to make the weekend and summer moments of our existence last far longer than nature intended. If we were lucky enough to be born into the middle or upper classes, we spent our childhoods basking in the benefits of a Freudian revolution that sought to understand and analyze our every hiccup, to explain away any annoying brattiness. A mollycoddled lot, we then came of age during the hale and wealthy ’60s, when the cost of living well was nil — and the cost of loving dangerously wasn’t an AIDS death sentence. As Canadians, we got the upside of the wild social climate created by the Vietnam War — and none of the downside. It wasn’t our brothers or lovers dying on the front lines, after all.
Later on, we often put off having families because we had made it the painstaking work of our self-indulgent young-adult lives to figure out exactly who we were first, down to every nuanced neurosis, every subtle behaviour. “Oh, my God!” said a T-shirt I recall seeing in the ’80s, “I forgot to have children!” Lots of us did. And the holiday stretched on.
But by our late 30s, most had finally succumbed to the pull to reproduce — and suddenly, our endless summer was over. We faced a whole spate of responsibilities — a word we’d always associated with our elders — and found ourselves not necessarily well prepared to handle them. There were elementary school pageants to attend, teachers to meet, wills to write, mortgages to assume. In spite of our best efforts to avoid it, adulthood was looming at last. We had to cram for it, and fast.
And so, in the nick of time, we matured on command. Like every generation before us, we managed to rise to the challenge of ensuring that there would be a generation after us.
Lately, though, I’ve been trying to get ready for a different kind of Monday — my final shot at existence, my last chance to actively participate in the strange and wonderful business of being here. I keep thinking I need to buy supplies to meet the task of the rest of my life — a crisp, new leaf in the form of an agenda, maybe, and some yellow HB pencils, all sharpened and at the ready.
On the other hand, since we seem to have aced adulthood after all, perhaps it’s OK to celebrate with a smidgen of intemperance once again. Maybe we should embrace this last fecund season of our life with unabashed childhood glee. Let’s make a metaphorical mud puddle or two or string daisies together in a chain, pushing thoughts of autumn and winter out of our heads.
The cold will come soon enough. No need to stop and wait for it.
Follow Rosa Harris on Twitter: @rharrisa.
