End of Summer: A Brief Backward Glance

“Summer’s almost over. Soon it’s back to school.
Soon they’ll drain the water out of the swimming pool.
Adopt a brand new attitude, a positive outlook.
Buy yourself some pencils and a loose-leaf notebook.”

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III

Yes, he’s the same guy who wrote “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road,” but I’m in a more contemplative mood this morning. Summer is, in fact, drawing to a close. I have summers now, by the way, now that I’m a professor. As a pastor I didn’t have them. Oh, June, July and August still reported for duty, but no seasonal shift marked the transition, no change in schedule differentiated the days. Historians to this day do not know which stream is the Rubicon; it was such an insignificant trickle that nobody marked it on the map. What made it important was that Caesar crossed it. In my pastoral days a similar brook might have separated one season from the next but I had no time to stop and notice. The full-out blitz of chronos pushed me past any dividing line of kairos before I had sufficient leisure to be aware.

Not so in my current incarnation, where academic life breathes in and breathes out on a regular basis. We don’t shut down for the dog days here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies. Office hours remain as posted and we stand our watches as faithfully as ever. But it is a different time, a different season. No students, of course: classes met in one-week intensives very early in June and right at the end of August but nothing in between. Also, our president graciously allows each faculty member an additional afternoon off during this time. And we do different things - a little more long-range planning, additional attention to institutional life and overall vision, a little more sowing, a little less reaping and gathering into barns.

Still, classes begin next Tuesday. Wainwright’s lyric sounds the clarion call: I don’t actually use loose leaf notebooks much anymore and prefer my calligraphy pen to a Dixon Tyconderoga #2, but the point’s the same.

Summer’s almost over. A new season’s coming up.
Time to gird your loins and don your jockstrap and your cup.
The hiatus is ended. The lax living has to stop.
Get rid of that beer belly. Do wind sprints till you drop.

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III/blockquote>

Well no, not that, God be praised. Whenever, this summer, I’ve felt wistful about my advancing age (I’ll put another zero on the odometer before the spring semester ends), I’ve caught myself driving by a sun-bombed high school football field, gazing at the seven-man blocking sled like John McCain pondering the Hanoi Hilton and thanking God that youth is fleeting. Still, there is a sort of mental and spiritual “girding up,” a 1 Peter 1.13 kind of thing taking place. And let me say quickly that I like this change. I find myself waking up in the morning with lines for a lecture coursing through my mind.

Yet, teetering here on the apex of the roller-coaster track, poised on the tipping point of classes beginning and the Labor Day holiday, waiting to plunge forward into the adrenaline-splattered rush of it all, I thought it would be a good idea - at least that, if not a spiritual discipline and an act of worship - to pause long enough to ponder what the summer looked like, what it taught me, and what I take forward from here.

Stephen Scaer has written a delightful poem called “Time Management” that seems to fit my mood:

Luther in the year he spent
as Junker Joerg in Wartburg towers,
translated the New Testament
to pass the everlasting hours.

Though living as a refugee
Erasmus wrote his tour de force.
In Praise of Folly’s said to be
the product of a trip by horse.

With dinners late, D’Aguesseau saw
an opportunity to write
his sixteen-volume work of law
in fifteen minutes every night.

Today I slept late, took a walk,
sipped my coffee on my ragged lawn,
checked the mailbox, saw the clock,
and noticed half my life was gone.

Well, yes, and I’m sure Scaer’s humility is admirable and quite genuine. But I’m not so sure that a late morning, a long walk, and coffee with the dandelions is an unworthy way to mark one’s halfway point. At least I hope not, because my summer didn’t include major works of theology, law, or literature. Well, no more stalling; here’s the tab:

1. Travel: I went to Houston with my wife to visit our older son and his fiance, and Becky’s parents. We spent a couple of days in Brownwood with my folks as well, both of us taking individual time with good friends who live there and capping the whole thing with a fairly hilarious dinner on our last night. I even made a solo pilgrimage to Winedale, Texas to watch “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Richard III” performed by student actors in a barn so old you could still see the adze marks where some pioneer squared the logs. And last weekend an hegira to Dallas with my younger son to see our Boston Red Sox drop one to the Rangers in the Ballpark at Arlington. For someone who has always agreed with G. K. Chesterton that, of the two ways of getting back home the first is never to leave, I think this is a respectable record.

2. Exercise: My gym membership at the university expired and, not feeling like forking over forty-five bucks for the second summer session, I decided to start running again. I stopped a couple of years back when my body reached some kind of burnout and I’ve come to miss it. So I bought new shoes (twice what the gym pass would have run me!) and began with rather pitiful half-mile trots along the hiking trail here on our island. This morning I did three miles along the bay front and felt good at the end. I’ve renewed the membership at the fitness center and started integrating resistance training with my runs again. It’s all about Ecclesiastes 7.18.

3. Reading: I rediscovered Frederick Buechner’s Book of Beb this summer, a series I haven’t read since my initial encounter some five or six years ago now. It was like slipping on an old, comfortable pair of shoes after a work week spent in wing tips. Before that, I had remembered out of the blue (or dare I say “been reminded;” I’ll leave the subject of that passive verb purposefully vague) of an old favorite from my junior high days, Sinbad and Me by Kin Platt. An old pair of shoes? This was more like a time machine that put me back in the tennis shoes of a carefree kid with hours of time and miles of unfenced imagination in an Arizona summer long past. I recalled suddenly that it was this book that had first planted in me the lifelong ambition (as yet unfulfilled) to own an English bulldog.

4. Hobbies: Scanning a theological journal as I prepped for a fall course, I came across an article about a Japanese girl, stricken with cancer after Hiroshima, who set out to make one thousand origami cranes because tradition held that such an offering would bring peace to the world. It didn’t, and I still don’t think it will, but I somehow conceived a desire to try it for myself - one thousand prayers for the peace that will come only with the final realization of Christ’s kingdom, and will come today in my world only to the extent that I open myself to my Lord’s ancient prayer, “Thy kingdom come.” I’m up to seventy-seven of ‘em, enjoying myself immensely. I’ve sent some to friends and Becky has begun converting them into mobiles that hang from our ceiling. I’ve even figured out how to customize them because I know which part of the paper will end up being which part of the bird and so can put pictures or text where I choose. On the downside, I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like in my goal to teach myself the harmonica, but I’ll keep plugging away.

5. Mental exercise: When I started running, I decided I would use the time to memorize my favorites among Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. I’ve puffed down the path along the beaches of Ward Island with slips of sweaty paper in my hands, my feet slapping the surface in rhythm to the words I chant: “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall/Looking as if she were alive. I call . . . .” When I began I had only a few lines of a single piece, and could barely run far enough to recite that. This morning I strode my way through “My Last Duchess,” “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “The Laboratory” and, just for good measure, the “Prologue” to Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Summer’s almost over, fading like a tan.
Vacation time is running out like an unplugged fan.
Labor Day is coming. Wet the old grindstone.
For all those lazy, hazy, crazy days you must atone.

- “Summer’s Almost Over” by Louden Wainwright III

But perhaps that’s the wrong verb. “Atone”? No; first of all because, if any of these was a sinful use of my time, One much better qualified than I has made atonement already. And second because I can’t feel any of these was a sin - an enjoyment yes, but not a luxury; not plunder, though clearly a gift. Atonement? No! Thanksgiving. And I offer it heartily, for what lies behind, and what lies ahead.

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