August is the cruelest month burning generally, but it appears this year we're off to an early start. Ah, the fire season: the thing that puts the gold in the Golden State, not to mention the black in the skies, the specks of white ash on your cars, the red and yellow and even lime fire engines all over your highways and byways. Lord, it's a sight to stir the blood. And scare the piss out of the young ones. No wonder so few who live here were born here. They get the hell out.

Many young readers will apparently not understand the headline to this story. They won't know what a record player is, much less that it skips. The phrase "like a broken record" means nothing to them. That's one of the revelations of an email that regularly makes the rounds of college administrators concerning the current crop of incoming freshmen and what they know and don't know and why they're very different from you and me. (See below.) Courtesy of a friend who works at a college in Binghamton, NY.

JJ is visiting colleges next month in Massachussets, North Carolina and South Carolina. He's looking at several in California as well, but the prevailing winds appear to be easterly. The colleges here are very hard to get into and offer an impersonal, some would say spiritless, experience, which somehow seems right for this place. His mother is accompanying him east. On the visits only -- at least, so far.

JJ's got a job this summer, working in a trendy kids' clothing store and putting in lots of hours. Last week, he made more money than I did. Although his mother points out that's not so hard to do.

Tracey continues to work in the doctor's office, filing patients away or at least their medical records. Sarah's not working, not for pay at any rate. She's taking Cellular Biology and Organic Chemistry at Cal State Northridge so she can graduate on time (in a manner of speaking) and proving that if she takes them one at a time (two five-week semesters) she can kick their arses alright. I open up the computer lab at the adult school a couple of mornings a week, and talk about html even if no one wants to listen. And the rest of the time spend hours in the pool floating on my back and looking up at the blue, cloudless patch that sits above my house like a movie prop, and watching the airplanes from the Orient head down to LAX, and making sure they don't fall.

So the time peels away, and on I move into the deep, languid summer where the days blend seemlessly one into the next until it's no longer possible to distinguish this from the last. And look at the want ads sometimes.

"It's one more day up in the canyons, and one more night in Hollywood. If you think that I could be forgiven, wish you would." (Counting Crows, A Long December -- a song that was getting played on the radio when I first moved out here in the fall of '97.)

Next summer, outta here like Meatloaf's heart. Sad thing is, I've probably been here just long enough to miss it.

Here's a little something for all of you in listserve land to think about when you are out photographing those new freshman walking across the campus in their baggy jeans.

Just in case you weren't feeling too old today, this will certainly change things. Each year the staff at Beloit College in Wisconsin puts together a list to try to give the faculty a sense of the mindset of that year's incoming freshmen.

Here's this year's list:

So Ronnie is home now, laid to rest in the warm California sunset. When its last receding pink edge was barely visible in the sky, to the north we could see the amorphous gray cloud formed from the smoke of his final 21-gun salute. Imaginary fire rained down on the farm fields that fill the Tierra Rejada Valley below the Reagan Library.

On the way home, his motorcade passed through Thousand Oaks, so JJ and I dutifully traveled a few miles over to the northern edge of the Cal Lu U campus to watch it go by and pay our respects. “Cal Lu” is where the Dallas Cowboys used to hold pre-season camp and, rumor has it, will again. Just as we arrived, a policeman pointed out Air Force Mission flying low in the sky on its way to Point Mugu Naval Weapons Station, having made a pass over the Library only a couple of miles away.

The scene along Lynn Rd. was reminiscent of a Ridgewood Fourth of July parade: chairs lined up along the sidewalks, a festive crowd restless with anticipation on both sides of the street, pockets of conversation, babies in strollers, kids on bikes and skateboards, and here and there the faint alcoholic scent of cocktails in plastic cups.

The wait got a little long. Nobody seemed to know when the motorcade would get to us. Local neighbors who’d just walked out of their houses couldn’t agree on what they’d last seen on TV. Either they’d left Pt. Mugu twenty minutes early (in which case they should have been right in front of us) or hadn’t even departed yet. So I called home and got June to spot their location for me, which at the time was coming up the Conejo Grade, meaning twenty minutes away. Always easier to wait when you know.
I learned from soccer you can watch the game or photograph the game. In the effort to get shots, I felt like I didn’t really get to see the event. On top of that, my camera automatically shut itself off just as the motorcade reached us.

I got a few pics. Other people said they saw Margaret Thatcher though. I didn’t. And some said they saw Nancy Reagan. I didn’t. JJ felt the same way, and he wasn’t even shooting. Well, technically he was. He took a photo with his new picture phone, the new one I bought him to replace the other new one he just drowned – a week and a half after he got it. But that’s another story for another funeral.

We came back and watched the interment at the Library on TV, accompanied by guacamole and a very nice Chardonnay. I tried but couldn’t get a glimpse out the window of the smoke when they shot off the cannons, but in the hazy sky it wasn’t visible, or maybe it just needed time to collect itself and drift past the hill that blocks our view of Simi Valley.

But the geography I know well, as does JJ who observed that the fly-over was silhouetted against the homes on the hill opposite our own. And sure enough, out the window there were the three jets in the missing-man formation flying right past our house.

We ran to the back yard in time to see the fourth (missing) jet drop down back into the formation as they headed back to Pt. Mugu. Same guys who fly over the Rose bowl on New Years Day. (This seems to be a good house for plane spotting,)

We'd had house guests staying with us for two days, and I’d been heating the pool. They never got a chance to go in, but the family took a post memorial swim together, a rare evening activity for us. There’s a reason Bugs Bunny is always wearing a robe poolside in his cartoons. When the sun goes down out here, the air gets cold fast. The water temperature was up to 90o though, and no one cared about the air. It was on coming out of the pool that I made out the smoke plume.

So now Ronnie and I will watch the sunsets together. But he forever, and me not. His trip may be over, but I’ve still got more to go, and it will probably take me elsewhere, away from California. Our paths crossed right here though. At Sunset.

Picture Gallary

Every Memorial Day, our neighborhood gets treated to a flyover of World War II vintage fighter planes taking part in a ceremony at a cemetery a couple of miles away.

The first year we lived here, it was a little unnerving, but we figured, who would attack Thousand Oaks? Not even al Qaeda. I think they plan to live in So. Cal. if they win. What do they know about water? We were quickly able to confirm our suspicions in the LA Times, and we've looked forward to it every year. It's one thing about California even June likes.

This year they circled the other way on the first loop, away from us, but June called them over, and sure enough, they came. Right over the house.

SIU (Southern Illinois University) where I went to college was best known, at least when I was there, for drinking, and that's pretty much how we commemorated Memorial Day, as best I can remember. (We were still in session for another couple of weeks, and it helped us get ready for finals.) But Carbondale, the town where SIU is located, is tied in history to this holiday, as the following, from the US Army History website, will attest.

April 1866 - Carbondale, Illinois. Inspired by seeing a woman with two children putting flowers on graves in rural Hiller Cemetery, just outside Carbondale, Ambrose Crowell, Russell Winchester, and Jonathan F. Wiseman clean and decorate other graves that day; then organize a wider-scale memorial observance at the larger Carbondale Woodlawn Cemetery on 29 April 1866. 219 Civil War veterans march to the cemetery, Southern Illinois' own Major General John A. Logan gives the principal address. Sexton James Green makes memo of the occasion on a flyleaf of old family book, complete with date, location, etc. Carbondale, therefore makes the claim of the first organized, community-wide Memorial Day observance in United States.

In 1866 Carbondale Memorial Association, Inc. starts movement to establish its "first" claim. Illinois Congressman Kenneth Gray introduced House Bill No. 12175 to this end, to make Carbondale's Woodlawn Cemetery a national landmark.

Details lifted from www.army.mil/cmh - US Army Center of Military History, used with permission

It was this same John A. Logan who as Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic issued what was called General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day. He declared it to be "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land."

I would add that in my youth in Maryland in the 1950s, many older people called it by its original name, Decoration Day, and that's how I referred to it until we moved to Scranton, I believe, but that would date me.

General Logan has (or at least used to have) a very nice restaurant and bar named after him in the neighboring town of Murphysboro, IL.

The following, which seems appropriate to the day, and of perhaps broader appeal than the above, is also from their site, which is worth a visit, even after Memorial Day.

Chippewa, Upper Canada, 5 July 1814. The British commander watched the advancing American line contemptuously, for its men wore the rough gray coats issued those untrained levies he had easily whipped before. As the ranks advanced steadily through murderous grapeshot he realized his mistake: "Those are regulars, by God!" It was Winfield Scott's brigade of infantry, drilled through the previous winter into a crack outfit. It drove the British from the battlefield; better still, after two years of seemingly endless failures, it renewed the American soldier's faith in himself.

Man to parrot: "Can you talk? .... Can you talk? ... Can you talk?"

Parrot to man: "Can you fly?"

Soccer season is over, and JJ has a little pent-up energy to burn off.