“The day summer called it quits”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, September17, 2011
Summer doesn’t end on Labor Day. Not most years, it doesn’t. It doesn’t pack up its pup tent with the first day of school, whatever the kiddies think. And summer almost never stops the day the calendar insists it does, Sept. 22 this year.
Those are just arbitrary markers. Summer ends when it’s good and ready, which happened this year shortly after dusk Thursday.
The temperature was dropping. The light was fading. The air still smelled like cut grass. But an almost palpable crispness had slid in over that. For the first time in the second half of 2011, you needed a light jacket to feel comfortable outside.
There was no announcement from the TV weather people. No email. No headlines. But for the first time since a similar time a year ago, it was just cool enough to get a hint of winter approaching, still warm enough to believe that might still be a while.
We need a word for this moment, and we don’t have one. But I dare you to tell me it didn’t just arrive again.
JUST SAY NO
1. The wool’s too itchy.
2. The shovel’s lost somewhere in the garage.
3. No one looks good in bulky sweaters.
4. You seen the price of firewood?
5. It’s too early to even think about winter.
THE NEWS IN SONG:
One last blast.
Kid Rock, “All Summer Long”
ASKED AND UNANSWERED:
Three hours? Three lanes of the westbound LIE at Exit 42 had to be closed for three hours at the height of Friday morning rush to clean up one nonfatal accident? Really? . . . Only four of the federal Education Department’s 305 Blue Ribbon schools are on LI? That’s just 1.3 percent, as students at Clark, Oldfield, Forest Park and Willets Road schools already know . . . A possible closing of the West Nassau Processing Center and/or the Mid-Island Annex: necessary efficiency or Postal Service death spiral? Don’t fewer facilities mean slower mail, which means less business, which means bigger losses, which means fewer facilities? . . . What did you get for your 21st birthday? John Tavares got a six-year, $33-million contract that will keep him on LI through the 2017-18 season, assuming the Isles are still here . . . Which will blow harder? The ocean breezes? Or the Category 5 political gusts that always seemed to wreck offshore wind-farm dreams like the one envisioned 13 miles off western Nassau? . . . You see “The Wood”? Dan Klores’ gripping new play (Rattlestick Theater in Greenwich Village) is all about the late Newsday (and Post and Daily News) writer Mike McAlary, who broke the Abner Louima police-torture case while fighting cancer. Gritty stuff, but John Viscardi IS McAlary…$32 million? Is that really how much Long Island would save by creating townwide school districts? So says Marty Cantor at the Ll Center for Socio-Economic Policy…What’s the chance LIPA doesn’t pass along $176 million in Irene costs?
LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK:
MAURICE DEANE
You can’t call Maurice Deane a late bloomer. He’d already done quite well in pharmaceuticals when, in 1981 at age 50, he enrolled in law school at Hofstra, shooting straight to class valedictorian. But he treasured his time on campus, old enough to have changed his fellow students’ diapers. And he’s has been writing fat checks ever since. But none as fat as his latest pledge, $20 million, enough to get administrators to slap his name prominently on the door of what shall forever be known at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. He’d shown his appreciation. They showed theirs.
E-mail ellis@henican.com.
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
Never quit. Summer is a state of mind, before you find the other glove, it’s summer once again.