Summer, I was thinking, the other night when Aidy and I walked over to the pool thirty minutes before it closed for a quick swim - summer’s here now.

This one’s a little different. By this point - in our recent “normal” - it would be, as we like to call it, “The summer of Aidy,” a season we’ve gotten quite used to, which occurs after Nora and Gabe leave for their stints at camp in Maine, and prolonged time in the state thereafter. When we three, who remain in Connecticut, never plan dinner until the last minute, do laundry much less frequently and revel in this temporary family structure: one child only.

This year, only Gabe departed. Off to be a counselor-in-training in Maine, like his big sister was, the house devoid of near-constant Led Zeppelin chords on guitar. I really miss him, ever present in the kitchen looking for snacks, turning every room too loud with his commentary and classic rock, no matter if there were already people in there trying to have a quiet conversation. But Nora, due to the intricacies of this particular summer, including a desire to spend time at home and her required August move-in date - she’s here. Hanging with friends who fill our house with energy and music, organizing her belongings, wrangling free time before she heads up north herself for both work and vacation. Counting down the weeks until she packs those newly organized belongings for life in a freshman dorm.

(The dog, poor Maisie, her working breed instincts on fire, wanders from room to room, contemplating empty beds, suddenly-planned sleepovers, and late night arrivals. So good natured but I sense the undercurrent: guys, you are really pushing it, let’s get some structure back in place, ok?)

This scene, these oppressively hot days, are the backdrop for summer goal #1: listen to 20 full albums from start to finish, because I almost never do that anymore (with the notable exceptions of Waxahatchee’s album “Saint Cloud” and the Haim album “I Quit,” which I listened to incessantly upon discovering each in recent years) instead flipping through playlists, annoyed, becoming occasionally obsessed with a song, but mostly impatient, trying to figure out how a person even accesses new-to-them music in this digital landscape.

Whole-album listening is good because it’s one less decision to make: put the album on. Leave it on. And it’s good because that album becomes a soundtrack to a particular time period in a way that songs listened to in a more haphazard fashion do not.

I had, I’ll admit, sort of written Noah Kahan off when“Stick Season” was everywhere you turned. For no good reason. Like, “his music is pretty, but maybe not for me,” until two friends I really trust - my friend Erika telling me, and our friend Tara telling Nora - that we had to listen to his latest album, “The Great Divide.” Erika, in fact, doubled back to me where I stood in front of my house after we’d taken a walk together, “Wait, Cara!” she said, “the new Noah Kahan album - have you listened?” I said barely, and she said do it.

Aidy had asked me to play the song, “Dan,” - the last track on “The Great Divide” - once in the car, and I was surprised, it being not her kind of song (her kind of song being pumped up Taylor Swift). But she told me she’d heard and loved it, and sang along. It stayed with me like catchy, evocative songs do.

When that song really hit me, though, was after listening to the whole album, which I did this past week during car rides to work and camp and while doing errands. It was easy; I found him incredibly easy to listen to because of the so-pleasant melodies. But after digging into the lyrics - really listening to the album, my intent - it was challenging, too, because of the feelings that those phrases let loose.

You know how you can cry quietly, in a dignified manner? And then there is a different kind of crying, that, if you don’t restrain it, will turn into something wholly undignified? Deep sobs that can morph into laughter, like you’re a little crazy? That’s what Noah Kahan’s songs on this album unleash in me. It’s a good thing, like therapy, and it’s hard to explain. When he talks about how the horses in the song, “All Them Horses” did “not look scared at all,”… I know that feeling. Relatable, even though I could not presume to have experienced whatever he’s writing about.

“Dan,” listened to where it was placed, at the album’s end - an album filled with unexpected deepness, sadness, that I had erroneously not predicted when writing off that happy-seeming singer of “Stick Season” - produced a much stronger reaction than when Aidy first asked me to play it. When I finished the album one morning this week on my way into New Haven, I had to sit and collect myself in my parking space.

There are unquestionably sad lyrics in this song. “We’re so alone, most of the time. Most of the time, we don’t have anyone.” Those lyrics aren’t what got me, though. It was positive, my heart wrenching. It was the description of friendship, the kind you long for so hard, even when you’re right there in it with the friends in question.“Where do we go, when we die? I wouldn’t mind right here, I wouldn’t mind at all.” How many times have I felt that way? The most intense language almost not enough to characterize the emotion?

Which, actually, is exactly how Aidy is, always desperate to describe her joy, her passion, her anger, using the most extreme words, ever since she could talk, alarming us with her superlatives…her diehard need to explain this deep chasm of feeling! I thought, then: ok, this is an Aidy song after all.

Summer goals 2026:

Listen to 20 full albums from start to finish (recommendations welcome!)
(1)Noah Kahan, “The Great Divide”
(2)The Talking Heads, “Remain in Light”
(3) Hurray for the Riff Raff, “The Past is Still Alive”
(4)…
(5)…
(6)…
Read poetry
Walk around the track at the high school, preferably at dusk when the lights turn on
Ease back into learning Italian
Visit yet unvisited spots on Yale’s campus
Get new glasses
Swim whenever there is an opportunity (2025 goal)
Make a “to be read” pile by the bedside table
Yoga once a week
Finish Ulysses
Attend the wedding of a very old friend
Long talks by and in the pool
Go to cardio tennis!
Make future weekend getaway plans
Try at least 10 new recipes
Dinner by the beach with Aidy
Get comfortable making a proper Negroni; practice on friends
Plant flowers, vegetables and otherwise spend time working on our front and back yards
Clear out closets and other storage spaces with the aim of knowing where everything is once school starts this fall
Tour the Glass House in New Canaan (2023 goal)
Get iced coffees, make life plans
Post-ocean-jump dock sunbathing
Family road trip…
..to take my daughter to college

It has come to my attention that, once Nora departs for college, I will gain some closet space.

A positive development.

Not that I won’t miss her, not that life isn’t shifting so much for our entire family. The intensity of emotion right now, spilling out during moments of rare quiet (a solo car ride from one celebratory event to the next, these seniors committed to having as much fun as possible with one another while simultaneously being ready to go; spotting this year’s middle schoolers waiting for the bus on the corner, like my youngest - our elementary school days now over - will wait next year…do they ever stop growing up, even for a second?) is so indelible that you know its impact right as it’s happening.

But, as far as practical matters are concerned, come summer’s end, a member of our household will be moving out (as much as college students ever really do) and I can use her closets for things like bulky sweaters. I have been thinking about this: gaining space. Both physically and figuratively.

The other night my three children - side by side - were trying to sing in harmony at the kitchen counter, laughing when it went awry, and I had to force myself not to ruin the moment by telling them to remember these times forever.

Like hiking up and down a mountain, is how this feels. For all these years our household kept growing - the number of people and then the people themselves - and now, after another buoyant summer, it’s going to get smaller.

Which brings me to the closet space. Sure, two kids at home is still plenty of kids. But (caveats aside, because I do understand Nora will be back, and that having a child in college is certainly not the end of parenting them) as my children are approaching what’s next, I’m thinking about how I want to do the same.

J and I talk about vacations we will take with Aidy when it’s just the three of us someday. We talk about retirement (good grief). The flip side of these heady feelings surrounding life’s emotional milestones are the giddy ones surrounding new opportunities.

Our family has been playing the song “Shakedown Street” by the Grateful Dead on repeat after hearing an excellent rendition performed by students at one of the many arts school concerts we attended this year. This got me thinking about the way I used to listen to music (wholeheartedly, without being able to tear myself away) verses the way I listen to it now (frantically as if there’s never enough time to get a full song in).

How this jibes with the way our attention spans behave overall these days and how I’ve been trying to resist the multitasking lifestyle modernity wants us to be living, resisting the narrative that time is in short supply, out of our control.

Not in a lofty way! This concentration-stealing, immediacy-required living…it just doesn’t feel good. Nora and I discuss throwing our phones away. We’re all talk, but what can we do that’s real, we ask.

So I said to J and Gabe: what if I listened to every live rendition ever recorded of “Shakedown Street” as a summer goal. They told me that was a “weird” idea for someone like me, and I had to remind them that not only was I once very into the Dead, but I had a hemp necklace, you guys.

They were unmoved, and I decided that while I will continue to embrace my former roots, perhaps there is a better music-focused goal that doesn’t include listening to the same song over and over.

That I will get glasses with progressive lenses so my nighttime reading does not require a carefully placed one million watt bulb by my bedside (so I am more prone to doing it). Go for regular post-dinner walks with friends or family members willing to come along and claim the space that exists in between all the rest. Move the sweaters, stand in my closet and marvel at how rethinking how you approach your shelves and your hours makes such a notable difference.

Summer goals 2026:

Listen to 20 full albums from start to finish (recommendations welcome!)
Read poetry
Walk around the track at the high school, preferably at dusk when the lights turn on
Ease back into learning Italian
Visit yet unvisited spots on Yale’s campus
Get new glasses
Swim whenever there is an opportunity (2025 goal)
Make a “to be read” pile by the bedside table
Yoga once a week
Finish Ulysses
Attend the wedding of a very old friend
Long talks by and in the pool
Go to cardio tennis!
Make future weekend getaway plans
Try at least 10 new recipes
Dinner by the beach with Aidy
Get comfortable making a proper Negroni; practice on friends
Plant flowers, vegetables and otherwise spend time working on our front and back yards
Clear out closets and other storage spaces with the aim of knowing where everything is once school starts this fall
Tour the Glass House in New Canaan (2023 goal)
Get iced coffees, make life plans
Post-ocean-jump dock sunbathing
Family road trip…
..to take my daughter to college

Listen to 20 albums: #1, Noah Kahan, "The Great Divide"

2026 summer goals (well, well, well, you can never tell!)