Today is August 1 and we begin our march to the end of another summer. It’s our last day with our granddaughters before I take them to the airport for their return flight home to Brooklyn. We are all on short time now. For over a year since I defeated my edema by, among other things, wearing compression socks almost every minute of every day, I have been wearing long pants rather than shorts. Boys wearing short pants until a certain age (typically graduating to long trousers around age 12–16) was standard in Britain and much of Europe from roughly the late 1800s through the mid-20th century. The custom faded gradually rather than ending at one clear point, but a few markers came to pass. Victorian and Edwardian times through the 1950s were the peak era of the practice. Short trousers signaled boyhood; long trousers marked a rite of passage toward manhood, often tied to starting secondary school (around age 11-13) or leaving school altogether. The decline of the practice began accelerating in the 1950s-60s, as changing fashion norms and postwar culture loosened rigid age-based dress codes. School uniforms held on longest with many British school uniforms requiring short trousers for younger boys well into the 1960s and 70s, with some schools continuing the tradition even later. By the 1970s-80s the custom had largely disappeared as a strict social rule in most Western countries, surviving mainly in a few conservative school uniform policies. It was never as rigid a “rule” in the US as in Britain. American boys shifted to long pants somewhat earlier and less formally. I rarely wore shorts growing up, favoring chinos until high school, when the blue jean craze took over.
When I moved out to this hilltop seven years ago, I started wearing shorts almost every day for perhaps eight months of the year, in keeping with the warmer and more pleasant weather. My neighbors all mostly wear shorts every day and it is almost as if the custom is a badge of either the California lifestyle or perhaps the retired California lifestyle. But when I started with the compression socks, despite learning that many performance athletes were also wearing them to give their calf muscles a boost, I could not get comfortable with how shorts with compression socks looked. They always felt very geriatric to me, so I just wore long pants. That’s become my normal state of dress, even as we moved into the summer months. But to be honest, we had a pretty mild start to the summer with very little heat. Now that we are in the full swing of summer, with days regularly reaching up into the 90s, I’m inclined to reconsider my outfit. For the cruise we were just on and for several of the neighborhood BBQ gatherings I have bought a few pairs of nice shorts in addition to the athletic shorts I’ve added to my collection for my three-times-a-week training sessions and Gyrotonics. I’m not so sure my slimmed down and somewhat pale legs look like, but I am pretty sure I don’t give a damn any more, so I’m wearing shorts more as we are in the dog days of summer. I will note that I have found a brand of very lightweight tech pants that I wore to Disneyland and have found are really just as cool as shorts, but still allows me to wear my compression socks without looking like Mr. Magoo on his way to assisted living. I now feel I have good warm weather options for all occasions.
In some ways I am back on schedule today after the week of cruising. I’ve done my training and will head off for my stretch, but then the rest of the day is dedicated to my short-timing granddaughters. They have announced to me that they want to do three things that they have somehow not yet done on this month-long visit that has been so action-packed. They want to go in the hot tub (no problem), climb the rock wall (they should be well-practiced given their onboard rock climbing) and they want to go for a motorcycle ride through the neighborhood (not a problem for me, but their mother always cringes at the thought). We are going at noon for a visit to something called the Pug Cafe. It’s actually called CuppaPug and its America’s first pug café. It’s a place where guests can cuddle rescued pugs in a fun cafe environment, with 15-20 pugs on hand. Pugs wearing pink bandanas are up for adoption, and part of the concept is connecting visitors with rescue pugs who could become forever companions. It’s a concept that started in London, where founders Aaron Carty and Matthew Pieterse rescued a pug named Gizmo with serious heart problems, and the concept took off from there, eventually expanding to the U.S. with Escondido as the first American location. It costs $30 per session and we are booked for 1pm. We bring our own carrots/strawberries to feed the pugs, and outside treats aren’t allowed. Needless to say, my wife, daughter and granddaughters are dog-crazy so its not hard to imagine why this is a must-do activity for them.
The rest of the day we will freeform it as Carolyn chooses since tomorrow morning I will be driving the crew to the airport. They have been here with us for five weeks and its amazing how quickly that time seems to go. We do not know how many of these wonderful summer visits we will squeeze out of these young ladies before they have had enough of the old fogies and prefer to stay with their pals in Brooklyn or head off to parts unknown on summer programs, but we hope to have a few more. Part of my job is to find enticements to make another year something they can look forward to. We have already begun to plan a week-long visit to Hawaii for next year. I threw that out there during the cruise, knowing exactly what I was I was doing, baiting the hook, as grandparents do.
Life is good, but life is also short and it only gets shorter the older you get. I can manage just fine not wearing shorts in the summer, but I cannot imagine a summer not spent with my family doing things they want to do, whether I care to do them or not. I look at my short friend, Buddy, who, by the way, is sporting a very short haircut for the summer months. He has been in as much of seventh heaven as Kim and I have with the girls here for the month. He may not be a pug, but he is very pug-like and knows better than any of us that one really must seize each and every day. On the cruise ship, for some reason, there is a huge painted sign on the upper deck which screams in purple…CARPE DIEM. It’s the one cruise ship photo I asked to have taken of me. Life is simply too short, so put on your shorts and grab some gusto.