Summer's End?
Summer is ending, or so some of my friends have observed in the past couple of days. It doesn’t quite ring true for me, though.
Outside of the weather, for 18 years I defined seasons by the calendar of American education. Summer was synonymous with “vacation,” even as I grew older and started a job as soon as I was done with school for the year. Winter meant dragging through mid-year exams and praying for off days for snow — rare in Richmond where 40-degree rain and occasional 2-inch accumulations were the norm, but non-existent in Blacksburg with 25-degree highs, one-foot accumulations, and a town public works department that actually knew how to handle the white stuff. Spring didn’t have much meaning until college, where it became a label for a time period starting in the aforementioned 25-degree Blacksburg and ending with a move to by-then-90-degree Richmond.
So what to do with the seasons, now that I’m in the working world and there isn’t much left to differentiate between them? Oh, there are events in the company’s life: the end/beginning of a fiscal year, peak “season”(s) if you’re in retail (meaning 3-6 week bursts), and the like. But none of those are huge changes in the everyday routine. Basically, leaving academia and entering the real world means that for the rest of your life, each day will look more or less the same as the next: get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep, repeat until age 65 (if you’re both lucky and good with your retirement financial planning).
One obvious way I could differentiate is through sports. In his book Ciao, America, Beppe Severgnini, an Italian journalist who spent 1994-95 living in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, observed the influence sports has on our seasons when assessing soccer’s possibility of success in the States: “The crack of the bat provides the soundtrack for summer. During the fall, Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings are occupied by the solemn rituals of American football. Winter and spring bring with them the thump of the basketball against the backboard, the deafening, rhythmic chants of the fans, and the rantings of the commentators.” (Sounds like he watched a few ACC games with Dick Vitale doing color.)
The influence of sports probably is the most obvious difference in the seasons for me — fall means even more-frequent-than-usual trips up 64 and down 81 with 43,000 of my closest friends (estimating that 20,000 or so regular attendees are local), while winter brings the Renegades the RiverDogs, and spring and summer take me to the Diamond or Salem Memorial Baseball Stadium.
I suppose the work environment is more relaxed during the summer, too. It’s tough to run projects on a very tight schedule when you know that most of your co-workers, whose lives are influenced (if not dictated) by their kids’ school calendars, will disappear for a week or two. Time away is a little easier to come by, and the dress code loosens even further.
But in the end, work is work. Long-term vacations are restricted to those who never quite managed to leave school — which is one of the first positive thoughts about academia to occur to me in quite a while.
18 August 2003 / 0 Comments / Tags: life