Dear Paul Revere
Nate in the Heights fills Paul Revere in on summer planning nowadays in Medford: "Between camps, family vacations on both sides, visitors, and, oh yeah, my day job, it seems like that expanse of potentiality I thrived on as a kid has been replaced by an immutable schedule of predictability."
Updating our greatest fleeting guest on the most important details in modern life in Medford
By Nate Rubright
Dear Paul Revere,
Do you ever get the feeling that summer is already over? As a kid, the beginning of summer heralded the infinite expanse of possibility. School ended and my days instantly became an amorphous blob of sunscreen, parks, yards, woods, freeze pops, and neighbors’ garden hoses to drink out of. Maybe that was a past that was never a present, but it is what my memories have amalgamated.
Life obviously changes as you get older. It’s the end of May here in Medford and I have finally locked in the major pieces of our summer planning. Like you, I’ve got kids. Unlike you, I only have two of them. Between camps, family vacations on both sides, visitors, and, oh yeah, my day job, it seems like that expanse of potentiality I thrived on as a kid has been replaced by an immutable schedule of predictability.
I have no idea how you managed to keep things organized. I guess school looked a little different since kids were already apprenticing as blacksmiths or some other colonial equivalent. I read somewhere also that summer as it exists now is because we had a more agrarian society and kids had to be home to help out on farms. The more I think about that one it confuses me because it seems like the harvest in the fall would be when you want all hands on deck. We are very much in school during the harvest and I don’t think that will change any time soon. Also, for all the city folk it seems like summer would be a pretty busy time because you didn’t have to put so much effort into survival.
Either way, the emergence of warmth from cold, life from the frozen dormancy of winter, beautiful color from desaturated grey, one can’t help but become romantic about what the near future holds. When that future becomes too planned, do you also become a certain amount of melancholy?
Fear not, once things get going your correspondent will be too busy to wallow,
Nate in the Heights
Nate Rubright is a Medford resident.
