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Reflection on summer ending

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 1, 2011 - Never mind that the autumn equinox slices the day in half this year at 09:04, Friday, Sept. 23, UTC, signaling the astronomical end of summer. For me the end draws nigh now. When the lights go out on Monday, Labor Day evening, summer's done. And on that night, in reverie, the little boy in me will fall exhausted into bed, worn out from chasing every final fugitive moment of summer's freedom.

On Tuesday morning, school will commence according to my chronobiological timepiece. No matter if it is genuine school, or grown-up endeavors that supplant school, autumn commences on the first Tuesday in September. Those of us who grew up governed by an authoritative calendar that decreed the big three-month vacation would begin on Memorial Day and end on Labor Day can't escape the bittersweet taste of memory served that first Monday in September.

For me, these last days of summer have become a time for reflection. I've made the acquaintance lately of a fellow named Michael Loynd, the lawyer, not the Major League pitcher. My friend Loynd plays in the renaissance league, that universal team of women and men sluggers who hit all sorts of balls out of the park with grace and abandon, seeming never to miss any pitches. Were Mike not so personable and generous, his competence at the bat of living might be annoying or jealous-making, take your pick.

He spent a couple of post-graduate years in Los Angeles hoping to make it in the movies, and he came within an inch of selling a screenplay. He exchanged the Sisyphean rigors of screenwriting for the law and settled into a marriage and helped to produce a family that includes four children. He is quietly but genuinely proud of his brood. He has a good law practice, and serves on lots of boards of directors. Full disclosure, he has been nominated to join the board of the St. Louis Beacon.

The fact that he has effectively amped up my reflections has little to do with all those accomplishments. Rather, it is because, on top of everything else, he is a novelist, and currently is shopping around his novel, "Chocolate Oirish Taters." This is a lively, dexterously written, sometimes dismaying account of an Irish-born widow with a half a dozen grown children who pulls up stakes and moves to a peninsula jutting out into Lake Michigan.

Mo O'Meara fancies herself a businesswoman. Instead of establishing her decidedly Hibernian business in a place such as Boston or New York, where Irishers are too numerous to shake a stick at, she opens it in decidedly non-Irish Door County, Wis., and experiences there prejudice all "others" experience when they have the audacity to move in next door. Interestingly, in the novel, resistance to O'Meara and her store came from people of Scandinavian descent.

There are lessons to be learned about issues that divide us from Mike's book, along with an expansive humor, plus young love and familial loyalty. I enjoyed all of this, but just as appealing was its evocation of Door County, where, in the town of Fish Creek, I spent a once-upon-a time happy week of summer. And here begins the business of end-of-summer reflection.

We visited good friends who had a house on Cottage Row, which overlooked Green Bay. We spent our time swimming and sailing, riding bikes and taking in a fish boil dinner, which is disdained by settled-in Door County summer people as being horribly declasse and touristy. It was fun. We spent a rainy day on the porch. That night, the northern lights put on an effulgent demonstration for us.

Fish Creek was indelibly charming; it is an important piece of my summer places jigsaw puzzle, one composed of happy times spent in rented or borrowed quarters in places such as the eastern end of Long Island; a rocky harbor in Maine; a venerable lodge on Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas; a little house on stilts on Grand Isle, La,; a past-its-prime but cozy hotel in Michigan.

Because of the essential summer place-ness of them, one might expect they'd run together, but I savored my time in each one with a magnifying glass of memory, so each exists in high relief.

I have Mike Loynd and his "Chocolate Oirish Taters" to thank for prompting this eruption of happy memories, and as I look at them through the magic of imagination I see they are arranged neatly like seashells and sand dollars and beach glass and wave-smoothed stones on a tabletop.

Remembrances of times lost to us often are burdens that impose outrageous and painful psychological demands. I have my share of those, but they do not include these memories of summer places I've visited and enjoyed. On the contrary, they elevate this time of summer's conclusion we are experiencing right now, a time bathed in special radiance, to status as a fifth season, a short, peaceful, happy time, a season of qualities quite individual, a season very much its own.

Robert W. Duffy reported on arts and culture for St. Louis Public Radio. He had a 32-year career at the Post-Dispatch, then helped to found the St. Louis Beacon, which merged in January with St. Louis Public Radio. He has written about the visual arts, music, architecture and urban design throughout his career.