It’s strange when summer ends. You know the signs. The lake where I swim gets cooler every day, though you can pretend not to notice it. I realize I get irrationally angry if children return to school in mid-August. That’s too early! It’s every child’s God-given right that school begins after Labor Day. Then we can all relax and enjoy the last days of the unscheduled season.

I’ve always loved New York in September. The art season begins in earnest. The students return to NYU. Football starts and Jets fans try to decide just how miserable their team will be. You start to see friends again, or make plans to anyway. It’s great.

Everything has been thrown off with what we’ve been calling “the current situation” for far too long. Frankly, I’m dying to go to a play. I really want to watch talented people perform. I want to be in an audience. I even want to be in an audience with strangers who are talking too loudly and doing the tedious things theater-goers seem determined to do.

In a strange way we have all been witnesses to Covid, the terrible equalizer. But we haven’t been able to share anything good together. And when we do—outdoor dining, for instance—there’s an understandable desperation, that swings too wildly, like people on Spring vacation determined to have a good time.

Seasons instruct us. They give rhythm to the year. Things haven’t been normal for so long that we are losing some of our seasonal clues, and our bearings in general. If we lose all our clues then we might as well move to Los Angeles and play tennis in perfect conditions every day, unless it’s one of the rare time it rains and then we’ll refuse to drive.

We keep getting closer to a more normal world and then it gets pulled away. With everything going on, fires, flood, Covid, the rest of it, normal feels further and further in the distance. And if this is the new normal then that is clearly untenable. After everything that’s happened let’s all hope for a better season.