{"id":8569,"date":"2014-05-23T07:02:01","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T15:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=8569"},"modified":"2014-05-23T07:02:01","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T15:02:01","slug":"light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2014\/05\/23\/light\/","title":{"rendered":"The Light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s staying light so late!<\/p>\n<p>I know, it&#8217;s almost Memorial Day. But Memorial Day is no longer the 30th, or was it the 31st? I&#8217;m forgetting, it&#8217;s been too long since holidays became expedient, Monday affairs so everybody could have a long weekend.<\/p>\n<p>Used to be it was Memorial Day that was hot, Labor Day cooled off.<\/p>\n<p>But not in Los Angeles. I&#8217;ve gotten sick on more than one Memorial Day, dressing for hot when it turned out to be cold, shivering in my shorts.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, summer is coming, and I&#8217;m not prepared for it. The hot days. Everybody going on vacation. I prefer to work. I want everyone home and paying attention.<\/p>\n<p>But one thing I love is these long days. Although they are confusing me. I sit in front of the computer thinking I&#8217;ve got hours left in the day and then I look at the clock and it&#8217;s almost over!<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s getting dark long after 8 in L.A. Long after 9 in Toronto. But it&#8217;s only going to last another month, and then the days will be getting shorter again, counting down the hours until Christmas, when we start going in the other direction again.<\/p>\n<p>And when you&#8217;re young the world doesn&#8217;t spin fast enough.<\/p>\n<p>But when you&#8217;re old, you want to slow it down.<\/p>\n<p>I want it to stay light this late for a few months, I want to savor it. The yellow. The brightness. The feeling that life is all about endless possibilities.<\/p>\n<p>And sure it&#8217;ll be hot in July and August, but every day will be a bit shorter, it will be depressing.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t help think about growing up, playing baseball, I lived to play baseball, back when you told your mother you&#8217;d be home for dinner and walked out the front door to god knows where.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;d get on your bike, I&#8217;d get on my bike and ride to the school where we&#8217;d play. Eventually Little League. Which began practice on April 1st and games at the end of the month. Which means you had to start throwing in March, to be ready.<\/p>\n<p>But this was back before the Major League started in March and played until November. The season was over the first week of October and it rarely snowed in April.<\/p>\n<p>And unlike today, we went to school through the middle of June, and never had to return until after Labor Day. Now everything&#8217;s sped up, kids are out in May and suddenly August is a school month. As for colleges, it seems they don&#8217;t even go to school at all.<\/p>\n<p>And I never want to go back to school. You&#8217;re supposed to learn but too few of the teachers are stimulating, especially as you enter higher education. I prefer following my muse, my interests, that&#8217;s what I love about the Internet, the ability to dig down deep.<\/p>\n<p>Do kids lie in the backyard and stare at the sky anymore? Marveling how the clouds move?<\/p>\n<p>Do they take their sleeping bags out and look at the stars, and wake up to the sun long before their parents, and go inside and watch cartoons?<\/p>\n<p>Wait, that was before it was a badge of honor to never sleep, when kids arose before parents, before adults boasted that they got up at 4:30, why would you want to get up so early? Don&#8217;t you love the night time?<\/p>\n<p>I do. It&#8217;s when everything slows down, when the driven wind down and the night owls like me inherit the earth.<\/p>\n<p>So much of my life is lived in the darkness. But not now. It&#8217;s like I&#8217;m in the bonus round, the recipient of a natural plus that thrills me, that I don&#8217;t want to let go of.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s going to evaporate.<\/p>\n<p>And at some point, I won&#8217;t even be here.<\/p>\n<p>So I want to savor it. As those younger than me believe they&#8217;re going to live forever, but those of us wise enough to know better marvel at the simple things, knowing that possessions are overrated, that a German car is nice, but not necessary, that it&#8217;s what you feel inside that counts, because what you show to the outside no one&#8217;s looking at.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s staying light so late! I know, it&#8217;s almost Memorial Day. But Memorial Day is no longer the 30th, or was it the 31st? I&#8217;m forgetting, it&#8217;s been too long since holidays became expedient, Monday affairs so everybody could have a long weekend. Used to be it was Memorial Day that was hot, Labor Day [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-light","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8570,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8569\/revisions\/8570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}