I am in terre incognita here. I wake each morning with the dread feeling that something awful is either about to happen, or already has. I am staying away form the television. The left and the alt.right commentators are savaging each other, and the kick-off for the Michigan game is still an hour and a half away. Perhaps NCAA football will fill the idle hours that we once spent in the water, swimming our way through the dog days of summer in Baghdad-on-the-Potomac. But this summer is, alas, toe-tagged. That is a useful phrase, describing the means by which the departed are identified at the morgue; a label on string is tied to the great toe complete with name and other information. Naturally, time has marched on, and anklebands (like the wristbands you get when you visit a hospital) are now more common. I can’t imagine trying to get a band around a whole season, though. There was so much crazy stuff that went on, in and out of the water.

But if I were filling out the tag, it would read:

Summer Pool Season
Born: Memorial Day
Expired: 9/11/2016, 8:00 PM
At Big Pink
Of Natural Causes

The grim realization is now complete. The pool should have been open today. Normally the Board authorizes the first two weekends in September for us to pretend that the summer has not been toe-tagged officially. This summer, though, the Blue Water pool management company announced that there were no lifeguards available anywhere in Northern Virginia, that last weekend last weekend was really it, and despite the furniture still being out and the water glittering under the late summer sunlight, we are sliding into the next season.

i was in mild denial through mid-week, sitting out on the patio, imagining that it was still Memorial Day, and that the gate was going to swing open to a full season of frolicking in the deep end.

That pleasant delusion came to a rapid end on Wednesday. A young American guy who was apparently willing to work showed up and started hauling tables, chairs and recliners over to the corner of the pool deck, stacking them in the smallest pile possible. I made a point of sitting out to see him work. As I enter my dotage, I enjoy observing other people work, and labor he did. He ran a thick outlet hose from the pool to the parking lot, got suction on the end, and the water level in the pool slowly lowered to what he considered an acceptable level. Then the green tarp came out from the basement, and was carefully rigged to the spring tensioners on the perimeter and hooked into the grommets set into the concrete deck.

Then he looked at it, surveyed his work for a moment, and then turned and stepped through the gate, locking it behind him and walked to the building to return the key to Rhonda at the front desk, where it will rest for the next eight months.

I have been in on one of the minor mysteries here in this venerable building: the key to the communal gas grill was exactly the same as the padlock on the gate. I always comforted myself with the idea that in an emergency, I could grab a New York Strip on a plate, sign out the key to the grill and go for a surreptitious swim.

That is going to have to wait until next season now.

And so what will take up our idle hours? It is difficult to imagine drinking more. I suppose we could sit up straight, do our civic duty, and serve as the informed citizenry the Framers imagined to make the tough electoral decisions that will keep America strong.

The idea of actually paying much attention to the opera buffa that passes as the political process is far too daunting, though. I Heard someone comment that this was the strangest campaign since the 1828 electoral battle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams given the amount of bald-faced mud-slinging and outrageous assertions.

To make the time pass, and keep politics at bay, I suppose we could reconstitute the Book Group of last winter. That would give us motivation to open ourselves to new concepts and ideas. Plus, the nice thing about book groups is that you can read and drink while doing it.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com