A summer's day like this is every day

There is the morning where you are refreshed and there are things to do, the white afternoons that never end, where you have to do something, you have to go out there. But it's ninety-five degrees, and the trees leave no shadows, so you stay inside and you read or you watch TV or you eat or you nap.

Oprah is still on. You read the paper and there are already football stories on the front sports page, Ernie's of Ceresco is still selling furniture at Blowout prices, another restaurant, another "old favorite" is closing, another one is opening, a sports bar, or maybe a family grill.

A hot summer's afternoon is every afternoon. The light of the sun softens slightly. the heat isn't dulling your appitite anymore. You are ten years old and your mothe is baking Lasanga in her kitchen. You are twenty five and adding a hot dog to you Mac-n-Cheese. You are twenty one and your girlfriend is calling for pizza.

In the fall, when it's cool snough to wear long pants and a jacket, the seriousness will return.

You can take classes in the summer, set goals for the day. But they're just not as urgent as the sun. There's a small peak in drowsiness that we feel around three in the afternoon. The summer sun is why. So you do maybe half of what you meant to and you'll get to it tommorrow. The summer afternoon is all the time you have wasted, the jobs you settled for, the times when you skipped school, your friends chickened out, and you were stuck at home watching Teletubbies. All of your aimless days.