I have been doing this a long time, making summer goals. And it struck me, looking back at some of these lists the other day, that over the past couple of years I have been less successful at actually completing most - or even many - of them. Which is ok! The idea was always inspiration, not domination.

Then it struck me (and please bear with me, because this sounds like resignation) that I’m not sure I’m up for bold, one-off goals. At least not this year.

Not that I don’t want the excitement - the experiences you can book and purchase and see - but that, when I think about how I want to spend my days lately, it’s all about sinking into the things I have to - and really want to - do anyway. Sinking right in. Getting comfortable in unknown spaces.

To (and I can’t even believe I’m saying this) sit down on the coach with my notebook and computer and assess the best driver’s education course package and dates for Nora. Then, to call up the stairs to her, where she’s playing guitar with the door closed. To call unrelentingly (“NORA! NORRRRRRRRRRRRA”) until she opens the door, steps just outside, remaining close to her guitar, to the artistic confines of her bedroom, and says, “What?” Quietly, annoyed. Which, truth be told, I can hear, but I act like I can’t, because I want her down here with me so I can speak to her about the practical necessities of life in a normal volume, with eye contact. And while I admit there is nothing so offensive to the teenage spirit than a mom-on-a-mission repeatedly calling your name, demanding your presence for something so incredibly pedestrian, there is no battle so enticing to a parent of said teenager as getting your child to: come right here where I can see you. So I start in on her name again. I call until she stomps down the stairs and repeats, “WHAT.”

And I deliver the totally-worth-it-to-her reward. I have summoned you because I want to know how a Tuesday 7 to 9:30 pm Zoom class on driver’s safety sounds to you, I say. I have summoned you because we are taking on the world!

Here’s the truth: you can be ambitious right here and now, in the everyday necessities.

This is where I am. Notebook, computer, harassing the people I love into what I like to call, “kicking it into high gear.” To my delight, Nora asked me the other day if we could, “um, kick it into high gear” and buy some items she needed to buy for summer camp, and added (omg!) that she’d like to kick her college essay draft “into high gear” this summer. She gets it, despite the reluctance to come down the stairs sometimes. The joy of purpose-driven task completion.

That - rather than wanting to see a particular sight or plan a particular event - is it. Thinking less about the high-octane things I would like to do and more about how I would like to be.

Sinking in to higher level aims, too. Aims that harness creativity, or at least make it more accessible. I noticed that one thing I did do last summer was learn how to send a proper newsletter directly from this website to subscribers. It took some time, and my facing things that make me uncomfortable, like watching “marketing” tutorials on my hosting site, but the result was worth it, and so much more efficient than the copy-and-paste email method I’d been using for years.

I keep thinking about growth, but the kind of growth that makes you more yourself. More the person you’ve always been. Does that make sense?

On this note, I decided to pick a few noteworthy goals from summers past that I really liked but never got around to and added them to the list. And despite this all this high-minded purposefulness - or whatever one might call the preceding paragraphs, good grief! - I think a summer goals list should be first and foremost, fun. Also, while this season is great for “bucket-list” items, I am up for “you know it when you see it” goals, too.

I’ve already started up on a few of these, including my attempts at something that doesn’t sound fun, exactly, but I firmly believe will lead to much more of it: “no texting while walking.” Which, it turns out, I do all the time and, along with so many other aspects of my phone, find totally unpleasant. Not only physically uncomfortable, but mentally, because it is based on this (incorrect) assumption that I’ve got to be using nearly every spare moment to communicate crucial-seeming information. It’s part of this silly, modern take that distraction is worthiness. I’d like to try something different.

A challenging goal for this easygoing season, I think. But then I think again. Because it’s challenging at first. And then, like so often happens when you attempt, and adapt to, something new, life is so much easier.

Summer goals 2025:

Show the family around my old stomping grounds in Boston
Always bring a book
Get comfortable on the tennis court
Reinvestigate Italian citizenship
Run to the “All are welcome: area for rest and prayer” sign on the Farmington Canal Trail; rest (2024 goal)
Finish Ulysses
Swim whenever there is an opportunity
Pliability!
Buy summer dresses (this goal brought to you by Aidy)
Get a good summer breakfast (…and this one)
Fill the back patio with lots of flowers (2022 goal)
No texting while walking (whenever possible, which is nearly always)
Host a garage bar open mic night (2024 goal)
Explore new ways to share and utlize my writing
Do the New Haven Road Race (20K)
Reread some Steinbeck
Buy a bicycle
Try a new-to-us local restaurant
Explore wallpaper possibilities
Spend time with the houseplants
Stargaze
Look into auditing a class, and/or other educational opportunities
Make some plans with my brother
Happy hour(s)
Just go for it

A couple of weekends ago I was cleaning out my car. It was filled with Easter grass and chocolate wrappers because Gabe had spilled the entire contents of his basket on the floor while we were driving back from Pennsylvania to visit family, and he had “cleaned it up” but it turns out, not exactly. It had been a semi-stressful car ride for me, with that mess manifesting, as well as the fact that every time I looked in the rear-view mirror to instruct Gabe and Aidy not to eat any more candy, I’d see that their mouths were, yet again, full of jellybeans. They told me that they wouldn’t have any more, they swore it. But they would and they did.

Easter grass is notorious. Not easy to gather once it’s been dumped unceremoniously on the fabric floor of a car, then dispersed and flattened by a week’s worth of soccer cleats and regular shoes landing on top; shuffling feet, antsy. It’s a job for the high-powered vacuum you pay two dollars for at the gas station, which I’d get around to eventually, but for now, I wanted at least a semblance of peace while driving, one that doesn’t occur for me when the car is also a trash can.

I could hear Gabe playing Irish tunes on the piano from inside, the only type of music he’s played for the past two years after becoming fully enchanted with the Irish culture - his culture, by roughly half, more J’s genes than my own - on a trip we took two summers ago. I looked up and saw our roof covered in moss and wondered who you call to remedy that sort of thing, and would they tell us to go ahead and replace it, and for what cost? I thought about how much I enjoy this month. May, with too many end-of-year school concerts and all the excitement before summer rushes in. How we are in the midst of all that, and also, maybe, a constitutional crisis. Those are the places my mind went, and lingered, while I worked on the task at hand. But I couldn’t get all the Easter grass out. It’s impossible, and I’ll find strands years from now, however long this car lasts.

The gift of time, I often tell people - especially other parents - is knowing that it’s all a stage. I agonized over the fact that Nora, now 16 and studying for her AP US History exam (copious notes, tiny handwriting), would nap forever in her baby swing but not in the crib as a newborn, and that now, looking back, those worried weeks don’t even register as emotional memories. I know I felt that way, but I cannot actually feel it again. Dispersed. That I know I’ll carry this white, favorite sweatshirt of Aidy’s - “Paris” in bold letters across the front - from the car to the house again, and again, because she does not (ever) heed my request to bring her belongings in when we arrive in the driveway. And that one day, I won’t remember this in a real way either. The difference is that now I know. Now I know not to agonize in the first place.

No one ever told me that at 47-years-old the repetition inherent in this life we live would have softened me into such a philosophical person.

I came back from a run recently. The kitchen was a mess with pizza boxes and Gabe was making something called Japanese soufflé pancakes, which required, it seems, a lot of bowls. He hadn’t done what I encourage my family to do (incessantly really) which is empty the dishwasher of the clean dishes before dirtying a whole other dishwasher’s worth. And that’s what I thought about first. About this lack in progress despite my entreaties, and all the things that were wrong with that. But is that what you want to see in this moment? To remember? I asked that of myself without prompting, the process finally inherent, habit. The dishwasher? And not the soufflé pancakes, whatever those are, made by your teenage son, impossibly tall suddenly, who wants to be a chef someday? Not the sweet friends of Nora’s who were here last night eating the pizza and watching “Hamilton”, which they decided was a creative form of Friday-night studying for that upcoming AP exam?

A few days later, Aidy and I were walking home from a neighborhood gathering; cheese boards and chips scattered on our friends’ outdoor dining table, a surprise storm, children running from the back yard to the front. Playing “Just Dance” in the living room, muggy with their collective ebullience.

It was close to 10 pm and the streets were quiet; the norm for where we live at such an hour. She was talking a mile a minute, which she tends to do when she’s got my uninterrupted attention on a walk like this. About this spring and her schedule and something her friends did, it’s hard to recall all the details.

And I did it then, the zoning-right-in. The smell of the plants wet from rain and her voice, so cute still. So determined, like the world’s fate depended on the persuasiveness of her commentary.

We rounded the corner on the last street before our own. “Life,” Aidy said, like a realization and a prayer. “Life is so great.” I squeezed her band. That’s exactly what she said.

2025 summer goals

Ruminations while cleaning out a car cluttered with Easter debris