Point of View: Sumer Is Icumen In
Our spirits have been rising lately with the promise of spring, though spring, as anyone who’s lived in Bonac a while knows, can be a will-o’-the-wisp, heralding the year’s truly most depressing season — summer.
It’s not “A-a-pril come she will,” it’s “Memorial Day, get ou — out of my way.”
Winter has its depressing moments too, though there is some cheer in inveighing against unseen Principalities and Powers as you edge ever closer to the fire. In summer, of course, the object of your disaffection is closer at hand, too close at hand if he or she is the one who’s just bent your fender, or has extended his or her (to be politically correct) middle finger.
We’ve been lucky in that regard. When someone, a well-known someone, crinkled our driver’s-side panel in the Amagansett I.G.A. parking lot once, she was kind enough (I say kind enough because civility doesn’t live here anymore, at least not the year round) to leave a brief confessional autographed note, promising to pay for the repair, which she was to do in its entirety.
People always used to leave notes when they dinged your car, but it is rare nowadays, just as it seems to have become rare to stop when someone’s been whacked in the night.
Do unto others, et cetera. . . . Which reminds me I’ve just ordered from BookHampton the Oxford Annotated Bible, which was one of the books on my late mother-in-law’s Index. They made me pay for it up front, but, as I’ve said, in so many words, you can’t trust people these days. Not even me, although I think I may be genetically predisposed to do the right thing. (Note: There is hope now that they may one day be able to remove from your DNA the gene for sanctimony.)
“Sometimes people order books and don’t pick them up” was the explanation.
“Good God, you drive a hard bargain,” I said, wondering why they would think the world’s most popular book (it is still, isn’t it?) would go unclaimed for long. Soon after, I returned with the cash, and of course I asked for a receipt, intending to write it off as a professional expense.
Well I know not everyone’s perfect; I do take every deduction I can get. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that I work round-the-clock, even though I’m a narcoleptic. I would write poetry too, but I’m told insomniacs do that.
Meanwhile, as Robert Burns said, “Nae man can tether time or tide.”
Or summer in the Hamptons either.