Winter, it is generally agreed, is the harshest season. But summer may be the cruelest. It offers its promises with soft, welcoming arms only to snatch them away.
This has been a particularly brutal summer, my conservative uncle, with whom I regularly spar verbally, offered, and I can’t but agree. Yet it began with such hopes, didn’t it? Having ushered in a new administration and an arsenal of vaccines, we were ready for the summer of independence, the summer of yes, the summer of us.
Instead masking and vaccination were met in many areas of the United States with resistance, which enabled the Delta variant of the coronavirus to establish a beachhead. Cases spiked. So did the death toll, which has now surpassed that of Americans who succumbed to the flu epidemic of 1918.
While the new Biden administration hit the ground running on vaccine availability, Covid aid and infrastructure, it stumbled on immigration, the end of the Afghan war and a multilateral approach to countering China. As July gave way to August — and fires and drought in the West were matched by hurricane floods in the East, a scenario that was replayed in Europe — the summer of 2021 began to look like a mirror of summer 2020, the same thing only different.
If sports are metaphors for life, Novak Djokovic once again encapsulated the sense of promise unfulfilled. Having won the Australian and French Opens and Wimbledon, he was poised to win the Golden Slam — the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in July and the US Open in August, something no man had ever done. Instead he lost in the semifinals of both events to the same man, Alexander Zverev. When Zverev told him after he defeated him in Tokyo that he would be remembered as one of the greatest players ever, it was not merely a consoling remark but a kind of valedictory, a reminder that Djokovic is at 34 no longer the 24 year old who chased Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal all the way to the top and then dominated men’s tennis for a decade.
If a 40-year-old tennis player is a 65-year-old office worker, as John McEnroe said referring to Fed and Serena Williams — hey, John, don’t remind us — then a 34-year-old player is a fiftysomething office worker. And how many of them have been let go?
Djokovic’s summer was the quintessence of summer — the season in which everything ends. The bloom burnishes and fades. What grows on the vine either ripens to be plucked or withers and dies.
“Now trees with a sign stand and shiver while their dreams fall and die. And all my dreams are there, wrapped up somewhere in summer leaves,” the penniless Belle sings as she relinquishes the increasingly materialistic young Ebenezer Scrooge in “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.” How many of our dreams this year will be “wrapped up somewhere in summer leaves?”
At 3:19 p.m. Sept. 22, a cruel, cruel summer will give way to fall, which wouldn’t be so bad except that it leads to winter, season of ice and snow, cold and darkness. And yet, autumn and winter have their beauties — sherbet sunsets and canyon clouds, jewel colors and clothing with real weight and structure, holiday meals and gifts, pumpkin muffins and hot chocolate, Eastern Standard Time (one more hour of sleep) and all of nature’s spectral solitude. Not for nothing is the season of darkness also the season of light, in which the days grow longer once again.
And even if this weren’t so, what’s to be done about it? “It comes anyway,” my uncle says of fall, the season in which he’ll turn 92.
So I will welcome autumn — even as I dream once more of spring.