The Boys Of Summer

Some of the normal rhythms of summer have caused me to become confused. The part where I looked up as my wife and I rolled our cart through Target and she asked me if I thought that our son needed any school supplies. Glue. Pencils. Erasers. Sharpener. Binder. Maybe a cigar box into which he could put the entire collection for storage. I tried to shrug this off, but my wife insisted that she text our son, who is in his third year of college to see if there was anything on his list. When we received no response, we let it go, assuming either he already had enough of these necessities to get him through the semester or perhaps he was at work and couldn't be bothered.
Or some combination of the two.
The other mild awakening came when I realized that there was only a month left in the regular season of professional baseball. This year has been a rather dull and pitiful ride for both bay area teams. The highlight for me was heading out to the park for a Father's Day game against the Yankees with my son. The Oakland Athletics showed up that day, and completed a four game sweep of those Bronx Bombers. At that time, there were still a couple of players whose names we recognized wearing the green and gold. By the end of the week, they were gone too. That makes this officially a "rebuilding year," which is what sports organizations like to call losing two thirds of their games and selling off any of their high-priced talent.
A month and a half later, my son came back to town and we returned to that stadium to watch Green Day play and all-star caliber set, complete with post-game fireworks. We bought our T-shirts. We paid for parking. Now the grounds crew is getting ready to turn the diamond into some sort of football-baseball hybrid, at least for the time it takes until the Oakland Raiders move to Las Vegas. This will be an odd two-year separation process.
Not unlike the one we're experiencing with our son's school supplies.