As the closing days of August grow fewer and fewer, I gaze out across the Atlantic from my Virginia beach point of view and look back on the heady days of surf, sand and sun. I do so because that ocean goes on for so long I think it must almost come close to bumping up against eternity itself.
Many Julys ago I spent that particular month as a camp counselor several hundred miles to the west. And I would, in these my teenage years, think how August was the same and yet so different across our great land.
I was always a bit of disjointed philosopher then who would try to do something with this month that just sits there doing little else but getting hotter and hotter while it spawns hurricanes and temps rise high enough to fry eggs on sidewalks. There are no holidays or official days off or parades in this mercury-rising month. Who wants to march when the temperature sits at over 100. It isn't a national holiday but it should be -- National Tea Drinking on the Back Porch Day.
I think it was a very hot day in August that I began to collect motivational sayings. It was cool in the library and we didn't have air-conditioning. Three of what are now hundreds stand out in my mind and memory.
“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” – Don Marquis
“I’m in love with the potential of miracles. For me, the safest place is out on a limb.” – Shirley MacLaine
“Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow wood. Only today does the fire burn brightly.” – Eskimo proverb.
For all its debilitating heat great accomplishments have taken place:
Oxygen was discovered, an appropriate discovery. World War II ended. The Red Cross was founded. Life goes on.
I've always loved books and the air-conditioned library just down the street would do any igloo proud. And the cold invigorates rather than disheartens. You find pluses wherever they abound. Often I would search out strange facts for no other reason than to enliven these dog days to give them some bite.
Choice morsels such as:
Coca-Cola was originally green. The average number of people airborne over the United States at any given hour is 61,000. The first novel written on a typewriter was Tom Sawyer. Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th – John Hancock and Charles Thomson; most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't signed until 5 years later.
Maybe I was too long in the August heat before writing this article but here's to September for those of you not enamored with August.
I haven't really been trying to do a number on August. I mean who could dislike a month that has the courage of its summer-overheated convictions in it? I mean there is not even the hint of fall in it...well, maybe in some states that hover on Canada.