Dog Days are Over

The dog days of August are over. Thank goodness. The 90 degree heat is diminishing and the hot days are not quite so long. This makes my job as a home repairman much easier. Everyone in any type of construction knows that all building materials are heavy and everything that needs to be loosened is hard to loosen. So in these dog days a guy gets home dog tired.

I do remember the dog days as a kid, though. I grew up in Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes. Dog days meant more swimming and I didn't mind that at all. And there were certainly a lot of lakes to swim in. It seemed like public beaches were everywhere. The swimming pool (or the cement pond, as Jethro would call it) was virtually an unheard of concept to me. However, the year after I graduated they had a pool in the new high school.

I would go to Lum Park and swim at the beach. We had a diving board, trampoline, and a raft. Only advanced swimmers could use those. I looked pretty smug standing on the raft. Some friends and I would often go to the Nokassippi River to swim. There we would dive off the bridge into a deep pocket of water. It was there I saved a person from drowning.

In Minneapolis I swam in lake Calhoun. It was also there that I was baptized. It was also there that I saved the guy who baptized me from drowning.

So, when I was a kid, dog days was no big thing, except for one thing..... school was right around the corner. I always looked forward to gym class. But I didn't think too much of the other subjects. I got tired of getting Cees and Dees. Phy Ed was always A's. But I did like getting together with my friends once again.

The dog days of summer also meant going to the county fair. Our county fair had a midway carnival, stock car races, country singers, the 4-H, commercial buildings, live stock, rodeos, and all of the exhibition buildings. I won two blue ribbons and one red ribbon at the fair without even trying. One day my friend, Greg, said to me, "You did really good at the fair." I had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out that my 5th grade teacher entered some of my art work (paintings) in the fine arts building, and all my paintings won ribbons. So the next year I tried really hard to do well and didn't win anything. That was the end of my art career.

The dog days of yesterday were much better than those of today. Now I work in the heat during the day and sit in air conditioning at night. Sometimes it's too hot to eat out on the deck. Now we close the windows to cool it off when we used to open the windows.

I do have one bad memory of the old dog days. We lived in this two story house and all the bedrooms were up stairs. It would get so hot in the room at night it was impossible to sleep. The screen on my window had a tear in it. I remember the mosquitoes coming in and buzzing around my head. I'd swat at them, but there was always more of them than me. Finally I would fall asleep. They must have feasted.