End of summer

Aug. 7 began autumn in China when the temperature at dusk and dawn in the northeast got tolerable, though it remained scorching at midday. North China really did not feel like autumn but since Xi Jinping took his state visit to Mongolia late August, the warmth (though one could not tell by the way people were attired) remained a welcome state of the ambience.

The first Monday of September in the United States is considered the end of summer, though this is really more symbolic. It is the day before school kicks off so the feel for the end of summer is existentially real as families secure their camping gear in the garage, and the enterprising young boys and girls resume newspaper delivery routes.

The autumnal equinox does not occur until Sept. 22, but that is neither here nor there since the day is simply, more or less, the closest to equal time between daylight and nighttime at the equator when the sun looks like it is headed south; in fact, the Earth’s rotation just tilts that way.

The Labor Day beat is also America’s response to the worldwide observance of May Day, the latter of “socialist” origin from the labor unions at Chicago’s pre-Ferguson riot of police at McCormick’s!

End of summer is experienced more as the time when we set aside the white and light colored clothes for the darker ones that eventually end up with the solid dark come sun-deprived winter. Mainland U.S. and western Canada (a colleague sent me a picture of accumulated snow) drenched and soaked as fierce storms with hail and snow hit certain Midwest and Atlantic east coast regions.

On Saipan, we worked on our last BBQ for the year by the lagoon quaffing our ice-cold beer in the breeze, got the big screen for the NFL and college football seasons, and gathering chicken feathers and located the pumpkin pie recipe, cotton balls for snow, noted the gifts and lights to be shopped, located a real fir tree, caught a Pinoy to make real parol, and grabbed a crazy willing to be decked out as Santa in shorts to ride a water buffalo in December!

But we’re ahead of the season of the winter solstice when the Earth hits the longest night, and the shortest day starts getting longer again, appropriated conveniently by the patriarchs to celebrate the Body of Christ (Christ Mass).

Endless Summer was a movie when I was young, of guys who went around the world chasing after the big wave to surf. Being a resident of Hawaii, I am familiar with the surfing culture, more so because my brother lived in Waianae before he moved to the new city of Kapolei, both locations of which are only a hop and a skip toward the north shore where the real aficionados wait it out for the big one. For looking fashionably comfortable, of course, one heads for Waikiki with sunglasses, an occasional touch of sand but from the shore, not from wading in the wave and the water. Serious surfers inhabit the windward side of Oahu. 

Ours is a profession that goes by a “beginning-less summer” or more accurately, “hardly any summer” at all. I spent summers on Saipan with peers around meeting tables charting out the design of the incoming year in conferences too full to stretch the leg during deliberations, which was before we discovered that being aerobically fit also cleaned out the cobwebs of our minds, leaving brain cells to work efficiently and well.

Summer was what other people had before I lassoed them into the “productive” activities of the fall. This is the anti-fun component of my Victorian heritage as a second generation Methodist in a church parsonage. I already knew myself to have been born “beautifully brown” with the skin sheen akin and seen in Madagascar to Tahiti across the Indian Ocean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, from body surfing the waves and wild night dancing around the bonfire.

The end of summer in China came early this year as did the autumn rains that were too abundant in places not normally known to be wet, scarce in other places where dampness sweltered and aridity wilted the peonies, followed by the quakes and the monsoon-turn-violent typhoons; we had a sure-fire formula for tragedy. 

The season came with the view of my neighbors from my solarium and my kitchen back window more rosy than bleak. My immediate community has the oldest set of tenement houses (1995) in the old Shenbei Center, now dwarfed by the surrounding high-rises for urban professionals. A retiree across the street opens his non-performing repair shop to keep busy since it obviously does not add income to his retirement benefit. 

Younger men and women walk under my sunroom through the commons equipped with cellphones or tablets, locked in their own digital universes, ignoring each other’s presence. They adore at the altar of the renminbi attending to the next sales’ appointment and market deal.

The summer has not come to an end. Many just shut it down. Funny that I should just be discovering the pleasure of mine!