The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Saying, “Not much happens here in August” is the only thing that happens in August down at the cafe. Most of us mutter it to ourselves on our back porches while we’re swatting mosquitoes, listening to our swamp box wheeze sauna steam, surrounded by prone pets who have surrendered to the cool tile.
How bad is August? Hiroshima Day is in August. Other months get festive holidays like Christmas, New Years or Halloween. August gets Hiroshima Day.
Carlos declared, “All the good holidays are in the fall. Like Day of the Dead and Thanksgiving.”
He’s wrong. There is a fine day in August worthy of note: August 9th. The ninth of August should be a national holiday because — aside from being the birthday of this piffle peddler — it is the day President Richard Nixon resigned from office, a day worthy of commemoration, patriotic oration, fireworks and 18 minutes of silence, a reference understood only by readers older than most saguaros.
August is truly not an august month. I heard the word “au-gust” used properly in a BBC mini-series I binge-watched three times in a row because August is that boring. “Au-gust” means respected, distinguished and venerable, three characteristics one would never associate with August, a month disrespected, thoroughly undistinguished and only worthy of veneration if you were once this 11-year-old boy riding his Schwinn Sting-Ray bike in the drizzle.
August is a primal, muddy joy for such delinquents, a time of rainy arroyo trench warfare, rolls of dried Russian thistle tumbleweeds rolled into “barbed wire” coils, smashed through by Panzer tanks that looked a lot like city of Tucson trash trucks, puddles ripe for “depth charges,” mud clod fights with Tommy Ogley and Eric Estrada, sailing my Popsicle stick Kon-Tiki raft down the same flooded street that the week before swallowed my Revell model PT-109, which I had set ablaze.
We shared Sgt. Rock comics, favoring the line, “Nest’a’Krautz, Sarge!” a cry that preceded every mortar round of mud clods we lobbed over the tumbleweeds into the enemy trenches. We paid no attention to the natural beauty of hillsides greening from the monsoon soakings. With garbage can lids for shields and raised on “swords ’n’ spears” matinee TV we cared only for victory in the mud.
Furiously pedaling our Sting-Ray bikes home at sunset, spraying rooster tails of mud, we sliced through chocolate washes, our dirty hands draped over our biker bars, the Beatles on Tommy’s transistor radio, gliding home to mothers yelling our names, pedaling across the puddles of August, lifting our legs out, free, free, free.
In late August I was drafted by Myers Elementary to serve as a crosswalk guard. Standing on my side of Rosemont Avenue in my white safety patrol sash and belt, chrome whistle dangling, I asked Smart Tommy, the Captain of the Guard, facing me across the street and wearing the esteemed orange pith helmet, ”Who is August named after?”
“Augustus!” according to Smart Tommy. “The Washington Senators decided to honor their empire, Augustus Caesar, by naming a small pizza after him that they called the ‘Little Caesar, with Everything, hold the olives,’ but Augustus really thought August would be a swell name for a month and the Senate agreed, so they voted to let a gladiator kill the filibuster.”
We don’t savor August. No one says, “August! My favorite month of the year.” We wait for August to be over. Brad Pitt never said to Jennifer Aniston as he swatted a mosquito out of her hair, “We’ll always have August.” No one will ever croon, “August in New York.”
By August we are so fried from crawling through the gauntlet of summer heat we are hallucinating. In August, Tucson women become mermaids while Tucson men become “heat island” castaways with Fred Flintstone stubble, resembling grunting upright javelinas in cargo shorts.
Everyone at the cafe says these days the cafe’s swamp box cooler is as worthless as Congress. Carlos says we should think of August as, “a monthlong sweat lodge. A cleansing. First we had the blazing heat. Then the season of fire and then the rains! Embrace the Sweat Lodge, amigo.”
“I’d rather embrace a margarita.”
Fed up with summer, I say we aim for the puddles, pedal to build up enough speed, lift our feet straight out, and glide straight across August, daydreaming across September and October — all the way to a December night so cold you’ll need a blazing mesquite fire to keep warm.
Rosa says, “Snap out of it. Make the best of August.” And so I will. On August 9th, I’ll wish her and everyone at the Cafe a most august and happy President Richard Nixon Resignation Day.
