The Weekly Essay

Schools are starting to go back into session but for me, even when I was a student, summer isn’t really over until the end of August. The days are already getting shorter. Just a few weeks ago if I woke up in the dark I could roll over and eventually go back to sleep. Now when I wake in the dark it’s because the alarm has gone off and it’s time to get up. But it still feels like summer, or it did until earlier this week when I went outside and was shocked by how cold it was. Overnight the temperature dropped almost thirty degrees. It climbed back up with the sun but the change was still a reminder that summer is ending.

The trees haven’t started to change yet. They’re still full of bright green leaves. The hickory tree in the front yard is still forming its nuts; it’ll be a while before their deluge drives us nuts. The insects, though, have gotten the message. Even in the morning cold I could hear crickets calling to each other, katydids in the trees, and a few late season cicadas ratcheting away, desperate for one last chance. The end of summer always brings an urgency. Those who sing away most of the season in the dark continue to do so even after dawn; their lives are so compressed an hour must pass like a year.

Once I was lucky enough to start school after Labor Day. It was the start of seventh grade, the start of a new school for me, which was intimidating. I’d gone to the same school from kindergarten through sixth grade and most of my classes were in the same room, or adjacent to each other, and even by second grade I’d gotten to know the layout of the whole school, which was all one level. Seventh grade was a complete change; classes were held in different rooms, on different floors. We were given cards with our teachers’ names and their room numbers and expected to find our way. The first day everybody was allowed some leeway; there was a lot of ducking in and out of wrong rooms and teachers were patient. The second day everything changed. We were all expected to have the schedules and locations of everything down.

In the night between the second and third day a miracle happened: the air conditioning for the entire building broke. An emergency notice went out to parents that summer break would be extended just a little longer. In the end that meant over a week. It was September before we were able to go back in cool comfort, which, I think, meant more to the teachers than it did to any of us. Even though I wasn’t able to go back to the building during that time it did allow me to accept how much things had changed.

The only downside was having to wake up in the dark, but that too would have come no matter what.

Source: makeagif

I don’t mind going to the dentist. Oh no. I hate going to the dentist. This is in spite of all the hygienists, and, for that matter, all the dentists I’ve ever dealt with being really nice people who make me feel guilty for laughing so hard at Little Shop Of Horrors—both versions—but then I start thinking about what led them into dentistry as a profession and I stop feeling guilty and start getting worried. I’m always uncomfortable with visits to the doctor, and the gray walls and sterile exam rooms and bland art don’t help, but most of the time the doctor gives me a quick exam, asks me how I feel, and that’s it. A dental appointment is always going to be long and drawn out and uncomfortable because there’s always got to be the scraping, the gouging, the hammering—that’s just the parking lot. Then I get into the dentist’s office and in the waiting room they’ve got a nice coffee maker with a dozen different flavored creamers and a big jar of chocolate chip cookies. I try not to be cynical—when the hygienist suggests the four-hundred dollar gum cleans I believe it’s because she believes it’s really needed, not because there’s a significant markup on it. At least at one time my dentist had pictures of hockey players on the walls of her office, because she was the official dentists of the Nashville hockey team, and I could distract myself by thinking about how their checkups must either be really long, because they’d had so many teeth knocked out, or really short, because they’d had so many teeth knocked out. But the coffee and chocolate chip cookies there in the waiting room just sit there taunting me. For weeks before a dental appointment I become even more conscious of my brushing, flossing, and general tooth care. I stop eating Oreos and drinking apple cider vinegar straight from the bottle. And I understand the importance of dental hygiene. It’s been pressed on me since I was a kid; my first grade teacher poured a Coke into a jar and then put a nail in it. A week later the nail had dissolved. I said, “That’s it, I’m never storing my nails in Coke ever again.”

At my last dental appointment the hygienist told me I was past due to have my teeth X-rayed. I said okay and she took about fifty-seven pictures. Then she said, “I’m a little concerned about your teeth.” I was too—my mouth had just been hit with more radiation than Chernobyl. But then she said I might need a root canal. Separately the words “root” and “canal” generally conjure up pleasant images in my mind, but put them together and I feel like I’ve just had an icicle driven through my heart.

“I know it’s probably unavoidable,” I said, “but it would be nice if during the procedure I could just be knocked unconscious with my mouth propped open.”

“Oh, we can definitely do that,” she said.

That is a relief. I won’t even ask how they plan to knock me out.

It’s strange what we remember, and how distant memories can surprise us. A friend said something to me the other day and immediately reminded me of when I was eleven and found The Thing. It looked like a cross between an avocado and a pine cone, crosshatched with deep grooves and covered with the soft gray-green fur of an unripe peach, so of course I picked it up and took it home where it went into my collection that included a dead June bug, dried staghorn lichen, smoky quartz crystals, and other oddities. The Thing was the only item I couldn’t identify. I could have asked someone, or even just looked around the place where I found it for some clue to its identity, but I liked the mystery; it was earthy yet otherworldly.

Besides I’d found it in the grass outside the pool we went to. I’m not sure why I even saw it since most days when we went to the pool I was either too interested in getting into the water or too tired from a day spent in the water to notice anything else.

We went to a place called The Dolphin Club which seemed odd because there are no dolphins in Tennessee, but maybe The Catfish Club was already taken, The Bass Club would have sounded too much like a music place, and The Crappie Club just wouldn’t sound right. It wasn’t really a “club” either, but a big plus-sign shaped pool surrounded by concrete and a fence with a single cinderblock building that housed the office and changing rooms. Nearby there were a couple of crumbling tennis courts, a few trees, and a rock wall that ran along the road, but beyond that nothing but empty fields. It seemed like we spent most of the hottest days of summer there, maybe because there wasn’t much else to do. I was even on the swim team. I don’t remember being asked if I wanted to join the swim team, or even wanting to join the swim team. It was just something that happened and I went along because there wasn’t much else to do, though it meant getting up early and, instead of easing into the pool, jumping right in to chilly water, twisting my body around as bubbles floated up around me. I always had this image being transformed into a humpback whale, even though you’re even less likely to find those in Tennessee than dolphins.

The strange thing about me being on the swim team is that, even though I liked to swim, I wasn’t that strong of a swimmer. I couldn’t dive worth a damn either, only do a full-body flop off the starting blocks. But The Dolphin Club, cheap and a little rundown and out in the middle of nowhere, wasn’t as choosy as some of our competitors, bigger places that really were clubs, with indoor pools, hot tubs, and racquetball courts. I was also the only kid at The Dolphin Club who’d mastered the butterfly stroke. I was last in every competition but at least I had perfect form.

Then there was the swim team’s Fourth of July party, the only time I got to swim after dark, when underwater lights came on, the pool glowed aqua, and the sun overhead was replaced by stars, perhaps even the moon. As July drifted into the dog days of August and pool attendance dropped off the lifeguards would relax and we could throw the lounge chairs into the deep end, swim down, and stretch out in them as long as we could hold our breath. By summer’s end I could go from one end of the pool to the other without surfacing.

So with not a lot going on I forgot about The Thing. Except for the quartz crystals which I moved to my room the other specimens were thrown out into the yard. The Thing, for some reason, stayed on a shelf in the basement where I’d pass by it occasionally and wonder what it was before I turned away to something more important, like peeling a golf ball to find out what was inside. Its mystery would only be solved three years later when my parents planted a magnolia tree in the front yard. In the spring it produced creamy white blooms that dropped away, turning to leather, and at the start of summer the branches were covered with Things, each one studded with crimson seeds.