The rhythm I need

I need a certain rhythm to my life.

I like it that life has a beat to it. The beat of music helps me when I run. There is a cadence to the world around me that I find comforting, and it's brought on lately by this currently dreary transition from autumn to winter.

It couldn't be more dreary out there on this particular day. A front with low gray clouds and rain is moving into the region. The trees are long, long past their peak of colors; what leaves are left shudder on the branches with each puff of wind. My lawn needs raking, my gutters need cleaning and the patio furniture needs to be put away. All in all, not the prettiest scene outside my window.

Yet, as I drove on my errands this morning I was comforted by the otherwise glum surroundings. I was glad we are where we are in the seasonal transition. It means there will be snow and cold. There will be Thanksgiving and Christmas. There will be spring and Easter. There will be summer and the promise of hot days and the opportunity to surf again. And we'll loop around again to fall and the first taste of Oktoberfest beer from Sam Adams and the colors and the days just like today.

I have a stepdaughter doing an internship in Los Angeles, where there is no cadence to the seasons or even the weather, really. It's pretty much the same every day, she says. Born and bred in New Hampshire, she misses the color change of fall, even misses the fact that her campus in New York State has already had a little snow. I'm like her. I need the change to look forward to.

I find the rhythm by what I load and unload into the trunk of the car, depending on the season. The golf clubs and golf gear stay in the longest as I start to play as early as I can in the spring then through the summer and as late into the fall as possible. Then the golf stuff comes out, a portable snow shovel, fleece blanket and portable ski rack go in.

I find rhythm by figuring out who is where and who is with whom for the holidays. Between current spouses, ex-spouses, children, step-children, mom, mother-in-law, brothers and sisters and various in-laws and out-laws, there are a lot of travel plans to review.

I find rhythm in the rites that define us as families: The birthdays of the people I love, the college graduation in May of my son David and stepdaughter Eileen, Mother's Day and Father's Day, and the family celebrations we pull together if for no other reason than we're all in the same place at the same time.

The snow will fall soon and will need plowing and shoveling. It will get bitterly cold and I'll listen to the furnace burn through the propane. The spring rains will come and potentially flood the basement if the sump pumps can't keep up.

But so will the school vacation ski week in February and the college hockey tournaments in March and the first swing of the golf club in April and the first cut of the grass.

I look forward to it all.

Give the peace of summer a chance

One of my pet peeves is the marketing of holidays. Each year, it seems, advertisers start to trump a particular holiday earlier and earlier in order to spur sales. Last year, for example, we hadn't even gotten to Halloween when the advertising promotions for Christmas started. Now it's back to school that's getting me riled.

I know back to school isn't a holiday, but it's a significant seasonal event like Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas; it's an event that makes us sit up and take notice. The thing about back to school is that parents of students should sit up and take notice in August, as the month starts to nudge toward Labor Day. But we were barely beyond the Fourth of July when I noticed advertising inserts in my newspaper that were keyed to back-to-school sales. This drives me nuts.

In the same way that we have a biological clock, we also have a seasonal clock tied to the things that happen during the spring, summer, winter and fall. The rhythm of the seasons is important in the transition from one equinox to the other, especially for those of us in New England where the seasons can be so extreme from one to the other. Come Labor Day we can start the transition toward fall but not before. I'll accept Thanksgiving as the transition point to the Christmas season, but I don't accept Halloween as that transition point. Nor do I accept July 4 as the transition point from summer to back to school.

This must have caught the attention of the smart people at the Wall Street Journal who on Monday wrote a story about the earlier back-to-school advertising. According to the Journal story, back to school is the retailers' second-biggest selling period behind Christmas. And this year is especially important because consumers, battered by high gas prices and a jittery economy, aren't in much of a spending mood.

The Journal estimated spending for back-to-school and college related merchandise will be flat to slightly lower this year compared to last year, which saw a slight uptick in spending in large part because of must-have electronic items such as cell phones and music players. There isn't a must-have item this year, according to the Journal story. In an effort to distinguish themselves from a discount retailer such as Wal-Mart, said to the Journal, major retail chains have created marketing campaigns to attract the attention of consumers. Kohl's, for example, is launching a back-to-school clothes and accessories line from singer Avril Lavigne.

The whole thing strikes me as back-to-school chaos. I don't have back-to-school kids who I have to worry about any more. My son David, who'll be a college senior, is low maintenance when it comes time to start classes again. But you can see the change in pace and attitude in the general population when the time comes to go back to school. There's no need to hurry that along. We need to invite less stress, not more stress into our lives and summer is the time to concentrate on less stress.

Everything is relative, of course. Summers are not as stress free as I remember them. We're buffeted by the turbulence of uncertainty about our jobs, the economy, climate change, our children's future, our future. But we should be able to use summer to ratchet down the apprehension. Summer should allow us to melt stress as quickly as ice cubes in iced tea on a 90-degree day. We should be able to sit on the ocean beach or the lake shore and read a book that takes us away from the here and now. We should be able to hike and bike, canoe and kayak, sun and surf, relax and rejuvenate under the glare of the sun, not the glare of desperate merchandisers.

They only fuel the anxiety at a time when our tank of anxiety should be allowed to run empty.