Thread by @TheRealHoarse

When my son was little, our lives followed a certain arc.

When his life became chaotic and he needed more from me, I cut my work to the bone and gripped tight the steering wheel until it calmed again.

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And then I would let up on the wheel and hammer the gas pedal working as much as I could for as long as I could to make up for lost time.

There was a certain cadence to it.

Each year, I would end up spending early summer absolutely grinding away to work as much as I could.

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And then August would arrive and we would have spent little of it together.

There would have been camps and weeks away and highlights of summer - and none would be mine.

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So, we made up a thing:

Operation Summer Squeeze.

It was our code for the final weeks of summer - the weeks when the days were growing shorter and there was a clock ticking down and so much to do and so much we hadn’t done.

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In those last weeks, we would squeeze the very marrow from summer.

We would wrest from my depleted checking account enough to have fun on the beach and then the boardwalk.

I would find the money for a last meal of summer. We would eat at a place overlooking a bay.

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My son would order for us. Grilled octopus and shrimp cocktail and ceviche.

The waitress’ eyes would go wide and her eyebrows would rise as she took in the 10- and 11- and 12- year old ordering for the table.

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And I would sit, first in pride and then in joy, just awash in the sheer happiness as the very last sunset of a summer almost missed was instead ushered out together.

I love my son. I adore him.

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This year has been the first in a grueling run of many years when I haven’t been pressed to rescue a semblance of summer from the last of its embers.

For the first time in many years, I spent summer knowing our time together was planned rather than hoped for but uncertain.

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We are fresh back from a two-week trip I will carry with me woven deep into the fabric of my soul for as long as my walk on.

Tomorrow, we leave to squeeze one last ounce of summer from an August to remember.

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We’re headed up to see family in New Hampshire near the lake where I spent my own childhood summers.

It will be a modest visit of simplest means. Cookouts on the grill beside a simple cabin. Pancakes made on a hot plate. Maple syrup drizzled on vanilla ice cream.

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And the luxury of it will not be lost on me.

For the first year in a decade, there is no “squeeze” to this summer. No last minute hurried effort to wrest an ounce of vacation from a pound of work.

We have banked a great joy these past two weeks.

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And now I get to marinate in the rdays spent, memories made, and things done and recorded and treasured.

Now I get to put my feet up on a porch rail my grandfather once painted - a grandfather I adored who taught me to play golf and who died too young - and just soak it in.

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I have been invested with the most blessed of summers this year.

After a decade of the lowest lows in the hardest of years, we have stepped out from darkness into light.

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My son is 13 going on 14. The countdown of his childhood inches ever closer to midnight.

But for this one summer, this one month, these few weeks, there is only us: father and son, front seat and passenger seat, at ease, happy, filled with the surfeit of life at its most kind.

This year - for once - summer isn’t “the smell of hospitals in winter, and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters but no pearls.”

It isn’t A Long December.

It is a short August.

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I have loved this month.

It has been among the happiest of my life.

We’re in the car again tomorrow.

And then we will squeeze one last week from this special summer. I have loved few more.

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