Could this be the summer of love? It is summer. Days are long and sweet, hot and dry. Nights are cool and the sound of engines and car radios drifts through the open window, young people out cruising on the thoroughfares. August is here, yellow heads of goldenrod along the roadside warn of summer’s impermanence.

White sails glide along the lake – on shore, the summer camp season rises to a crescendo. In recent summers, I have been pressed into chaperone service at local inter-camp dances. There’s very little to do, really, the mosquitoes do a better job than any adult at discouraging would-be canoodlers from wandering outside.
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Sometimes you don’t recognize the significance of a date until years later. I’ve been thinking about Friday, December 11, 1992. There was a full moon. Strange things happen when the moon is full, some based in superstition, some based in fact. This story is based in fact. Full moons pull the tide higher, which was unfortunate on December 11, ’92, because a late-autumn Nor’easter was blowing along the Atlantic coast.

There were a number of storm surges and breached dunes and flooded seaside towns, but one effect of the storm sticks in my mind: the New York City subway shut down. If you’re not familiar with New York, that may not seem like a big deal, but believe me, it is. It takes quite a punch to shut down public transit in one of the world’s great commuter cities, and it happened that day. Tunnels were flooded, electric transformers were inundated with water and knocked offline. It wasn’t just the subway but also the trains of Metro North, New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad and Port Authority Trans-Hudson. Millions of commuters were stuck in the wrong state or borough well into the weekend, sleeping in the office, eating Chinese take-out.
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The national holiday is over and many of us are dehydrated from too much sun and beer, others have tinnitus from unexpectedly short fuses on those cherry bombs. It’s fine to relax on July Fourth, but the birthday – our 225th – should occasion reflection, the way a personal birthday does. While there are any number of topics available for reflection and reform, we would do well to consider our continuing use of the death penalty.

Thirty-seven hundred Americans are currently awaiting execution. Many of them will die, some will be shown to be innocent; proof of this innocence may or may not arrive before the ultimate moment. In the past 30 years, 90 Americans sentenced to die have been found innocent, an average of one every four months.
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Those of you entering fifth grade in September pay close attention during social studies class. You’ll be doing a unit on the feudal system, which was the dominant form of government in Europe during the Dark Ages. Under the feudal system, all property in the country was owned by the king and a handful of dukes, counts and earls. Almost everyone else was a landless peasant for whom life was – in one famous description – “nasty, brutish and short.” Health care was non-existent; charity, what there was of it, was provided by the church and if the church didn’t like you they told you to go to hell – literally. The tax system was straightforward. When the king needed money – usually to pay for a war – groups of thugs were sent out to shake down the landless peasants.

If you sit up straight, take good notes and do the homework assignments, then as a reward, you can take a nap during current events, because you will have already learned it all.
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