We haven't had a ton of traction since 2019, but that's only because of that whole "Covid" thing. It's time to get back to work and make Labor Day THE biggest issue of the 2024 Election Cycle. Forget global warming, inflation, abortion, and all those woke Chinese pandas at the National Zoo. This is the issue of our age, and it's not aging well.

Revived from September 1, 2019...

All of us at Dad Writes are about to begin a national movement. It’s a movement that will gladden the hearts of all Americans and heal the wounds of our universe. 
 
This is the one common goal left to humanity in the internet age. We are divided irrevocably on pretty much everything, but we finally have a cause to unite us and restore our faith in each other. We must rise up in an unrelenting and ultimately victorious campaign to move Labor Day to October.
 
As it stands, Labor Day is a depressing holiday, a last three-day weekend to mark the end of summer. Everyone slumps in their lawn chairs and talks about getting back to work while they complain that the fireworks were better on Independence Day. When it’s time for all the guests to leave, nobody talks about their plans for the week ahead, because everyone is planning to be in the office on Tuesday morning.
 
Alas, what began as a celebration of the labor union movement has deteriorated into a celebration of Mondays. Yep, we get this one off, but then we’re working every Monday until MLK Day 21 weeks from now. But Labor Day can be much happier, and more apt, if we make the logical choice to move it back a month. The reasons are compelling and, dare we say, irrefutable.
 
First, the equinox won’t come until September 23, this year, fully three weeks after we bury the season with a holiday marking the “official end of summer.” Insanity!!! Summer is a gift to treasure, not a curse to be canceled. Much like our participation trophies, regrets, grudges, and sixteen, we should hold onto summer as long we can.
 
Second, the weather is going to stay summery well into October in most of the country, because that’s how weather works.  Temperatures will still be warm, humidity levels will drop from their August peaks, and mosquito swarms will finally subside. We won’t notice it, though, because we all went back to work four weeks too early. What are we, nuts??
 
The sad reality is that September barbecues are never as relaxing or enjoyable as the same gatherings before Labor Day. Something is missing, and the missing ingredient is summer. We bury our best season prematurely at the start of September and then we just go through the motions. So sad.
 
But when we move Labor Day to October, we can finally return the holiday to its rightful role as a celebration of working stiffs, the people who build the buildings and plant the plants and assemble the assemblies. We can transform Labor Day into an upbeat extension of summer, rather than its forced execution. “Yeah, the days are shorter now that it’s officially fall, but we have about two weeks left until Labor Day,” we’d say, and we would be happier as a result.
 
When should the new Labor Day occur? We humbly propose the first Friday in October, which is the perfect date for a national holiday. Slotting Labor Day on a Friday will preserve the tradition of three-day weekends while dulling the sting of returning to work a few days later. At long last, people will have a real justification for all those TGIF memes.
 
Admit it. This is such a great idea that you’re already wondering two things:

1. Why didn’t I think of it?
2. How do I take credit for thinking of it?

 
We understand how you feel. The brainstorming team at Dad Writes is very proud of itself for this earthshaking idea and we are fine with sharing the credit with all the fans who inspire us to be creative geniuses. Or genii. Or whatever.
 
Enjoy your holiday and take heart. By this time next year, we will have achieved our goal and we will all be looking forward to another month of summer weekends.
 
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I’m really tired of people who complain that adulting is hard.
 
First, adulting isn’t even a real word, just a mashup where lazy people turn a noun into a verb by adding -ing at the end. Second, it’s one more way everyone whines about how tough life is and how their own lives are the toughest of all. Bunch o’ wimps.
 
You know what’s hard? Childing, that’s what. In fact, it’s second only to high-schooling on the list of things people never want to relive in life. Nobody says, “If I had my life over, I’d learn to poop on the toilet sooner,” or, “I really miss the active shooter drills. I made some great friends while hiding in the closet.”
 
No, they do not.
 
It all starts when it takes you eight months to realize the thing that keeps bopping you in the head is your own arm, and a bunch of giants pass you from one to the other until you just know one of them is going to eat you. Worse, you develop specific crying noises to let them know whether you’re wet or hungry and the giants always guess the wrong opening.
 
Then you’re two years old and you’ve already made the leap to adulthood. You complain, you whine, you’re stubborn, you’re demanding…just like them. The giants hate it, of course. They call it the terrible twos and punish you for the crime of premature adulting.  
 
You persevere, though, and try to speak like the giants, but they keep saying things like “ooogy cutie baby boogey yumyum” and it becomes clear they never want you to learn how to speak at all. Eventually, you figure out how to communicate with them without ever saying “ooogy cutie baby boogey yumyum,” but every time you ask for something, the answer is, “No.”
 
You don’t get to choose where you’ll go for dinner, what you’ll eat, or how many hours you’ll have to sit in the car on the way to Aunt Jenny's house. You don’t get to choose your clothes or where you’ll go on vacation or which shows you’ll watch or when you’ll go to sleep. Yeah, the giants will sometimes pick things you like, but it’s never really your choice and you know it. Meanwhile, they sound so brave and caring as they tell everyone, “I’m doing it all for my child.”
 
Being a kid is tough, 24/7. No, you don’t have to pay any bills or deal with the homeowners’ association, but you’re essentially a pinball careening from bumper to bumper. If you survive, you gain some sense of who you are and where you fit in, but then it all falls apart as you plunge into the two-headed hell-scape of puberty and high school. Plus, more active shooter drills, because nothing says carefree childhood as convincingly as hiding from strangers who want to kill you.
 
Then you arrive at adulting, the stage you’ve been envying since you were three. Yes, you have to work for a living and pay for stuff, but you get to choose where you live and what stuff you buy, what you’ll have for dinner and what movies you’ll watch. You get to share your opinions online and you control the music you’ll listen to in the car. You aren’t trapped in the back seat, pleading for “Baby Shark” while your father tortures you with Phish.
 
I haven’t started decrepitude-ing yet, but I’m 100% sure adulting will be my favorite life stage.  I’m old enough to have survived a million mistakes and I’ve learned the lessons from at least a few of those errors. I don’t need permission from my parents if I want to go to the park or see an R-rated movie and I can make my own choices when I’m fooding.
 
It turns out that adulting is the easiest part of life. The complaint department is now closed.

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Yet another note popped up in the email a few weeks ago, alerting me that one more classmate had taken his final breath.  The pace accelerates as we age and it’s cold comfort that I’m the reader, not the subject, of the message. It’s just one more reminder that the bell will run out of other people to toll for one of these days.

As is almost always the case, I remembered the departed only vaguely and hadn’t spoken to him in at least five decades, so I searched online for the latest deletion from our reunion list.  It turns out the guy was well known to other classmates, and not in a good way.

One after another, they recalled growing tired of him, fed up with his political intolerance, giving up on any useful engagement and, ultimately, had blocked him on social media. It was brutal, because you cannot “confide” anything online. Many of his online posts weren’t visible when I checked, so I still don’t know much about the guy, but it’s public record now that he was disliked by many onetime friends.

All the posthumous slings and arrows can do no harm to their target, of course. He’s beyond the point of knowing or caring about his favorability ratings. His family and friends could be saddened by the outpouring of, um, whatever the opposite of grief is, but he is blissfully immune.

That’s now, though, in the after, and this post is about before.

For him, for everyone, there absolutely is a before. There’s a time when the world is more open, when friends and strangers offer the benefit of the doubt and a willing ear. In the days before, the world is larger and more varied, more interesting and less predictable. Before, there is possibility and opportunity for us to accept…or reject.

Every day, we make a choice about how big and open our world will be, how lively and interesting our conversations will be, how much we’ll be challenged to expand our perspectives and build our wisdom. Some choose to grow, while others choose a path that is smaller, more limited, more constrained.

I really don’t know the details about this guy, but we know the process. We’ve all watched friends dissolve into humorless, angry warriors, sacrificing their own before for a new reality and a new persona.

In the time before, my onetime friend made a choice, or several choices, to take on a new crusade and dissolve the ties that bound him to the world he’d known. Perhaps he was happier in his new surroundings, more certain of his own worth and his rightness. Almost certainly, he was insulated from those who would challenge his view of the world and of himself.

I don’t really know, and it really doesn’t matter now, at least for him. For the rest of us, though, it’s still before. How big do we want our worlds to be? How much do we want to grow? How many people will we block—and how many will block us—on our journey from before to after?

We won't be posting about the inevitable next email, but maybe we'll say something interesting anyway. You'll be the first to know if you click here to subscribe.
 

Summer’s half over and I’m feeling the panic already.

I live for the summer, with the humidity and extended daylight and the warmth that caresses me when I walk out the door in the morning. The rest of the year, I live for pizza and bourbon, but even those necessities of life recede when the sun crosses the Tropic of Cancer and, perversely, it’s all downhill from there.

Summer is a race against the forces of nature, beginning as the sunlight peaks at the solstice and then slides into the dark like an allegory on aging. Summer mocks us with increasing warmth and escalating darkness, daring us to waste a day before it's gone. It taunts us into squandering the moments, leaving the gift unopened until it has evaporated into the might-have and should-have of regret.

Why did I agree to those meetings? Why did I block out time for lunches, indoors, when I could be out on the patio, watching cyclists on the lake shore? Why am I watching cyclists on the lake shore when I could be joining them, gleefully accepting Daniel Burnham’s gift to Chicago and savoring God’s gift to eternity? 

It’s the same every year as I come up with a plan to maximize relaxation--itself a contradiction--and vow not to waste as many moments as in prior years. And every year August arrives with the looming regret of a failed mission. I haven’t spent enough time on the bike path. I haven’t spent enough dawns at the river’s edge. I haven’t made the most of yet another blessing in my path.

Summer’s half over and I’m feeling the panic already.

This is the recurring failure in my life, so predictable that I should be inured by now. Summer arrives as I’m still ramping up for the season, still burdened by the leftover commitments of winter and spring. I begin to unload and redirect my calendar, but life invades and the days refill with odds and ends that break up the cadence.

It's the story of our lives and we all follow the same path. We vow to appreciate it more, savor it more, observe and remember it more, but we cannot get enough. Time and again, we find ourselves wanting in our enjoyment of The Gift. Whether it’s summer or life itself, we fail and rise to fail again, because it’s never possible to enjoy it enough in the time we have.

Every day, life is the gift card with an expiration date. The date isn’t printed on the label, but it’s in there somewhere. Summer is a subset, the gift I treasure that also expires. Best by September 20, sometimes September 21, but never December 21.

How is it August already? How am I not on the Prairie Path? What happened to all those lazy lunches at Navy Pier and 31st Street beach and dinners on the patio at Erie Café? I know it’s supposed to be relaxing, but I have a schedule to keep and I’m falling behind again, just as I did last year and the year before and the year before and….

Summer’s half over and I’m feeling the panic already.
 
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I had dinner with a friend and he asked me if I still feel safe living in Chicago.*

It wasn’t the first time he'd asked, but I take these questions as a sign of caring, so I pointed out, again, that this is a very safe city. I even pulled up a list of the cities with the most violent crime per capita and started reading it to him.

• Memphis, Detroit, Little Rock, Kansas City…
  

Clearly, he expected our Toddlin’ Town to be at the top of the list because, let’s face it, we’re a big media center and we get a ton of airtime on Fox. But big numbers in big cities are not as meaningful as the risk per person; the specific degree of danger I face when I walk out the door and onto the mean streets of Chi-town.

• St. Louis, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Baltimore…
  

As it turns out, we aren’t pulling our weight in this whole crime thing. We’re supposed to be the Crime Capital of the World, but we didn’t even make the top 75 on the list of the most violent cities so far this year. We hit number 20 if you count all crimes, but we don’t have a global reputation for jaywalking. When it comes to violence, we are total slackers.

• Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Houston, Indianapolis…
  

I took some heat a few weeks ago when I posted a satiric piece about how dangerous Chicago is, because I seemed (to some) to be oblivious to the hellhole that I call home. It’s true that I know people who have been victims of crimes, but they are the exception, not the rule.

• Denver, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Dallas…
  

The fact is that you can go essentially anywhere in this city any day of the week, on foot or on a bicycle, and nobody is going to hurt you. There are several neighborhoods I wouldn’t visit at three in the morning, of course, but nothing good happens at three in the morning.

• Anaheim (Disneyland??), Fayetteville, Davenport, Oklahoma City…

I feel safer here than in other cities, partly because I know where the risk is greatest and partly because we have a different mix of crimes than some other towns. I pay attention to my surroundings, which is a big-city necessity, but I also make an effort not to play in traffic. I’m not immune, of course. Nobody is immune. But we are much safer than most people think.

• Colorado Springs, Waco, Fargo, Tempe...

I quit reading the city crime list to my friend somewhere after number 60, and he was convinced, for the moment, that Chicago wasn’t as dangerous as he’d thought. He gets it, intellectually, but facts always come in fifth in a battle with emotion. Next time we meet, he’ll probably ask me again if I still feel safe living in Chicago.

 
*              Right now, six of my friends think this post is about them. Maybe I’ll name names in a future post, but you won’t know unless you click here to subscribe.