The Dog Days of 2021, a hopeful blog rant from a jarring year, P.R. Carreo
When the star Sirius pokes around the sun for the first time of the year, and is rising in the east at dawn. When August settles into her sultry heat, baking us into a faded polaroid of the previous month’s beachtime adventures. When we settle into the final days of summer, a little overcooked and overindulged, like a swollen lizard content basking on its reliably hot rock. Or since I live in Dublin, I’ll remove the heatwave demarkers, and just say, it’s when you feel everyone hanging on to that dream that was summer, sitting around cafes in the rain, and chatting over pints, a little calmer, a little less geeked than the previous sunny months, but quite content all the same. It was the day after a great wedding with nowhere to be but drunk all day. It was the warmly lit spa room after a good massage. These are the dog days of a summer passing by.
You can still see it across your instagram page, friends with their families, grasping at the fading light of a holiday – Malta, North Italy, French Riviera, Costa del Sol. All trying to live their lives, outside of this goddamn pandemic. Ireland and UK were hit particularly hard in 2021, not just from the virus itself, but from the excruciating tedium of a practically 9 month lockdown. It wasn’t until late July that there was really even an option to travel abroad, so as the “two week” summer of a Dublin July began to wane, everyone made their ‘hurry-up’ plans to capture something exotic in August. A last ditch effort before the spiking variants inevitably put us back into another cold isolated early winter.
I had at least three months at the beginning of this year in my home state of NY, where I was vaccinated earlier than my Irish friends, and could hang out in select restaurants and bars. Meanwhile Dublin stayed in lockdown all year, no retail shopping visits, no indoor or outdoor dining anywhere, as people settled for takeaway pints in the unsheltered cold, like wet dogs, huddled around in masses just to find some comradery. I only experienced some of this in May and June, and even though it was warming up, it still gnawed at one’s soul. At least I had a better break at home in the darkest part of winter. Albeit it was a bereavement visit for the death of my father, so let’s call it a draw. I had my family, and we all had each other.
Everyone in my neighborhood of the ‘Docklands’ took full advantage of July this year, and God did we all need it. The sun was out for it’s usual fleeting wink at the Emerald Isle. And I was determined to hit my reset button after a trying year and a half, isolated, grieving and unemployed. I made better plans to be outdoors, if only to spend my late mornings burning my forearms and shoulders, reading on a sunny cafe patio. I took more bike rides, to our city parks and a small passable beach along the Sandymount strand overlooking the Dublin Bay. I made a few trips down the Poolbeg pier to the mighty harbor’s lighthouse, and the Half Moon Swim and Polo Club swim spot. Basking on the rocks after a coldwater sea swim, and closing my eyes tight occasionally to imagine myself in the tropics. As things began to reopen for outdoor dining, I would toast the setting sun with Moretti glasses at a high table along the Grand Canal. And I realized at this moment, in my stature and by my own self-determination, I was already someplace proudly exotic that flowed like a dream.
And now, in the Dog Days of August, washed out by two weeks of unrelenting rain, I find myself in that familiar state of anyone that’s had their bellies full of summer, no matter the weather. 18 months of isolation, a year of grieving, and a whole lot of soul searching on any path for enlightenment that I can forage. I see the end of summer, and I see an end to my frozen state of being. Two more weeks by myself in August, and I continue to climb my way out of a bottle, late nights and later mornings… climbing back to my identity of serenity, responsibility, creativity and trust. Two weeks in NY again at the start of September to visit my widowed mother, and share kindness and joy with my sisters, my family in Rochester, my old friends by a familiar Pennsylvania lake. And onto the big city of New York to meet my new team, to start my new big job, my new career, my new life.
Not much has changed today, in the wake of this year of uncertainty, other than one new feeling. This predictably gray and ordinary Saturday passes as many before, sitting at my neighborhood coffee stop, gazing out at the pouring rain. I still feel a bit stuck sometimes, I still feel a bit unsure of the state of the world, the pandemic, myself. But in planning one last trip here before NY, my own Instagram grab at the Dog Days, I find relief in knowing it won’t be a mad scramble for sun, rather a soul’s retreat into something wild. I long to reclaim my wanderlust, a trust in the uncertain, not a crippling paralysis from it. So I plan a country trek to wild atlantic way, out west to Yeat’s Country in county Sligo, and some finality to this chapter in my life, as only a good poet could conceive.
My phone nudges me out of this reflection to remind me of my rail ride ticket in 48hrs, and I feel something new, something longed for. I feel hope again. And through that hope, despite any bumps and obstacles I will surely face in writing a new chapter for myself, I can hear more clearly that soft intuitive voice, whispering to me, “trust in me, trust in the world, and you will have peace of mind always.”
Paul Carreo 