The fleeting summer

Now that all of my kids have graduated, the end of the academic year doesn't mean as much to me as it used to (other than high school sports PA announcing opportunities drying up for a few months).

The only thing I really notice is that my drive to work gets faster in the summer.

I drive past a busy elementary school on weekday mornings. When school is in session, my commute usually coincides with drop-off time, and the line of cars backs up into the street I take to get to the office.

It's not that big a deal, especially because there's a friendly police officer there every morning directing traffic, and he allows those of us not dropping off kids to pull around the line and be on our merry way.

But that's not until we get relatively close to the school driveway. Until that point, I sit in stopped traffic for a few minutes, particularly if the school crossing guard is having a busy morning ferrying kids across the road (which he generally is, given that this school is in a residential neighborhood and features a lot of parents and kids walking to school).

Much like an 8-year-old in June looking forward to a long summer vacation, once school lets out, I get excited about 12 weeks of drop-off line-free driving in the mornings. It feels like I'm going to be zooming to and from work forever.

But before I know it, and way before it feels like it should be happening, the drop-off line is back. Early September rolls around and those same kids, all a little older and now a grade higher, are back out there clogging up the roads in pursuit of an education.

Again, not a burden at all, but it does remind me how fast summers go, especially when you live in a place like Northeast Ohio where cool (or freezing cold) weather is the rule eight months out of the year and sometimes longer.

We so look forward to summers here on America's North Coast (we're the only ones who call the southern shore of Lake Erie that) that once they arrive, we sometimes hang our entire emotional wellbeing on them.

"Please, please, please stay warm and dry. Just for a little while. Please. The snow will come soon enough. Whoever is in charge of the weather, I will pay them $1,000 just for the opportunity to wear flip-flops for a few weeks."

This helps to explain why so many people around here, especially boys in the 12 to 16 age range, start wearing shorts when it's still freezing outside. We're so desperate for warm weather that we'll pretend it's here once the weak, early-spring sun comes out, even if the air temperature tops out at 40 degrees.

All of this is to point out what you already know: (A) It's July 25th. Somehow. (B) It's still summer, but kids start going back to school in just a few weeks. (C) Nothing good ever seems to last.

Enjoy it while you can, gang.

The top 5 things I do on my 42-minute morning commute

(1) Listen to audiobooks
I recently finished "A Short History of World War I" and "A Short History of World War II," which are a combined 27 CDs long. They make me wonder how exactly Professor James L. Stokesbury, the author, defined "short." Clearly it has never bothered me, though, as by my estimate it was (and this is no exaggeration) somewhere between the 25th and 30th time I've listened through these books in their entirety since I first started getting them out of the library in the mid-90s. Back then I would get them on cassette, so that gives you an idea of how ancient my tie to these works is.

(2) Chew gum
Wrigley's Peppermint Cobalt 5. I go through 2-3 sticks a day, which as bad habits go is probably pretty low on the scale of badness.

(3) Dodge the insane drivers of Interstate 271 and Ohio Route 8.
We have covered this before. The good thing is that I now know exactly how I'll die. I will inevitably be rear-ended by someone who feels I should be doing 85 MPH in the far right lane. It's just a matter of when.

(4) Think about my meeting schedule for the day
I am not the biggest fan of corporate meetings. My former colleague Debbie Thornsberry said I always had The Meeting Face during meetings, which shows that even with great effort we sometimes cannot hide our true feelings. I understand the necessity of getting together with co-workers, but I quickly found out there's a good reason employees have dubbed it The Goodyear Tire and Meeting Company.

(5) Constantly make sure I have my ID badge, my phone, and my lunch
I have been known to forget one or more of these things on a given work day, and it always creates a big hassle when I do. So I look around, feel my pockets, and just generally do everything to make sure I have these essential items with me. It causes way more stress than it should.

Three things I actually miss about driving to work every day

For nearly 11 months now, I like many white-collar Americans have been working from home.

There is much to be recommended about this approach to work. The free and easily accessible snacks for one, and the massive savings on gas and car maintenance for another.

But I've come to realize there really are some things I miss about that drive to the office I used to take all the time, and that I presumably at some point in 2021 will begin taking regularly again. Here are three of them:

(1) THE GUM: I keep a stash of intensely flavored (and intensely scented) peppermint gum in my car, and my habit was always to pop a stick into my mouth at the start of my morning and evening commutes. It's not like I can't chew it when I'm at home, but I just don't think to do it and, for whatever reason, it's not the same. My wife, it should be noted, is not at all a fan of this gum or the way it smells, so I have to be careful not to chew it around her. She refers to my car as "The Mint Mobile" because of it.

(2) THE MUSIC: Over the last decade, I have become an avid fan of classical music. In that time I have built a considerable library of CDs covering most of the basic classical repertoire. I usually listen to those CDs in the car. Less commute time = less Beethoven time. This is unfortunate. I've tried to make up for it, but again, the car is my concert hall.

(3) THE 40 MINUTES OF QUIET TIME: Not that my life is the same sort of loud, chaotic daily existence it used to be when the kids were little, but there's something to be said for being by yourself, listening to what you want, and just generally enjoying the experience of driving to and from work every day. I do kind of miss that. It will return eventually, but for now, I miss it.

I don't miss driving to and from work

I'm all about finding the good things that come out of this pandemic, and one that I share with many is not having to deal with my work commute.

As commutes go in Northeast Ohio, mine is on the long-ish side at about 40 minutes each way. I know many people who go longer/farther than that, and many more whose drives to work aren't even half that long.

My office is just shy of 35 miles from my house. That means, in an average week pre-pandemic, I would put 350 miles on my car just to earn a living. Take away six weeks or so each year for vacation and being out of town for my job, and that meant 16,000 miles a year on my car in commutes. I was regularly putting 24K+ total on the odometer annually.

Again, I know people who log more miles, but for me, relative to my past commutes, that was a lot of miles.

Now I end up in the office for one reason or another only about once every 2 or 3 weeks. And when I do drive, there is less traffic on the road than there used to be, as many others are working from home like me.

The downside is that I used to use that drive time to listen to my classical music. Symphonies, in particular, can take 40 minutes to an hour or longer, and now I have to deliberately make time for listening to them. I also haven't listened to an audiobook in more than nine months.

But given the savings in gas and wear and tear on the car, that's a really small price to pay.

Once this thing is over, if I can continue working from my kitchen table a few times a week regularly, I'll feel like something good has come from it.

The pros and cons of a 45-minute daily commute to work

My office is approximately 35 miles from my house. In some parts of the country, that wouldn't be especially remarkable. Here in Northeast Ohio, it at least puts my commute on the long-ish end of the spectrum.

Not that I'm complaining, exactly. I actually enjoy that alone time in the car. But after a while, it gets to be a lot of alone time. Too much alone time, maybe.

My daily drive takes me through Downtown Cleveland, then southward to the little community of Olmsted Township. There is relatively little traffic, especially once I make my way through downtown and start travelling in the opposite direction of all the south- and west-siders trying to get to their office buildings.

For me, it's just a matter of distance. And it's the longest distance I've ever had to drive in my 24 years in the full-time workforce.

I pass the time in a variety of ways. Audiobooks are good, as are classical music CDs and WCLV, our local classical music station.

I also flip around to other radio stations, particularly the ones focusing on sports talk and 80s music. I can take both of those genres in large doses. Other stuff on the radio? It gets tedious even after a few minutes.

I know people who drive a lot farther every week than I do, but I have to say, that daily 70-mile round trip pushes my patience to the brink. I'll get to the half-hour mark or so and think, "OK, I don't want to be driving anymore. I'm just going to stop here, open up my laptop and do some work on the side of the freeway."

Which I never do, of course, but don't think I'm not tempted.

This is a First World Problem of the highest order. I get that. The fact is, I have a job to commute to. I make enough money to support my family of seven people. I can actually put an English & History degree to good use and for the benefit of society, which is a lot of more than many liberal arts majors can say.

Those are all blessings. But between the boredom, the frequent trips to the gas station and the constant worry about the wear and tear I'm putting on my (admittedly very durable) Honda, I'm starting to wonder whether those "Make $5 million a year working from home!" ads may hold some attraction after all.

The commute from my bedroom to the living room to start the work day would be heavenly. That I could handle, though I guess the audiobooks I listen to would need to be confined to short stories.