Hello, friends. It is Saturday evening, just about 7:00, and there is something wonderfully satisfying about reaching this particular hour on the last weekend of August and realizing that, for once, there is absolutely nowhere we need to be. No hospital corridor waiting for me, no patients to round on, no pager demanding attention, no meeting, no obligation, no reason to put on anything more sophisticated than whatever happens to be comfortable. The day has been long enough to feel earned, but the evening is still young enough to feel full of possibilities. Outside, it is about 73 degrees, the humidity has finally surrendered, and the air has that unmistakable late-August character that tells you summer is beginning its slow retreat. The leaves haven’t turned, the gardens are still green, and the days are still reasonably long, but there is a subtle change in the atmosphere, as though New England itself is quietly clearing its throat before autumn arrives. It is one of those evenings that makes you want to leave the doors open, turn off every machine in the house that doesn’t absolutely need to be running, and spend the night doing things that have no practical purpose whatsoever.
Which, naturally, is exactly what Sadie and I are doing.
Our Saturday began in the usual fashion for us, with work of a sort, although it is work that we willingly volunteer to do. We spent the day at the local Fire/EMS department, because apparently being physicians isn’t enough of a commitment to public service for either of us. We both maintain our paramedic licenses and continue to volunteer, and there is something deeply satisfying about putting those skills to use in the community where we live. Medicine has a funny way of becoming a very different thing when you take it out of the hospital and put yourself in a station house, an ambulance, or standing beside a patient on somebody’s front lawn. In the hospital, everything is structured around an enormous infrastructure of technology, personnel, laboratory medicine, imaging, operating rooms, intensive care units, and all the other machinery of modern medicine. Out here, medicine is distilled down to the patient, the examination, the physiology, the equipment you have with you, and the judgment you have accumulated over the years. We enjoy that immensely, although I suspect neither of us would admit that to anyone who thinks volunteering should be relaxing. It isn’t always relaxing. It is simply rewarding in a way that is difficult to explain unless you’ve done it.
Eventually, though, the day wound down, and we went our separate ways for a few hours. Sadie headed out to do the grocery shopping, which is one of those mundane domestic responsibilities that somehow becomes considerably more important when you know what the groceries are going to become later in the evening. I, meanwhile, did what any reasonable surgeon-paramedic with a few free hours on a beautiful Saturday afternoon would do: I went to the country club and played golf. I managed to get a pretty good deal on the course, and naturally, when a man is presented with the opportunity to save money while simultaneously spending nearly four hours chasing a little white ball around several acres of grass, there is really only one intellectually defensible decision to make. I took the deal and played the round.
Four hours later, I came home smelling faintly of golf course, sun, and the sort of peculiar combination of exertion and satisfaction that accompanies a round that has been just good enough to make you forget the shots that weren’t. There is something about golf that I have always found amusingly masochistic. You can hit one beautiful shot that makes you briefly believe you have finally figured the game out, followed three minutes later by a shot that makes you question whether you have ever actually held a golf club before. Yet somehow you keep going. By the time I pulled back into the driveway, however, I wasn’t particularly interested in analyzing my score. I was interested in being home.
And home was looking pretty good.
The first thing we did was turn off the central air conditioning, which may sound like an insignificant event to anyone who doesn’t live in a large old house, but those of you who have ever received an electric bill after running two four-ton units through the summer understand the emotional significance of that particular switch. There are moments in life when you don’t need a financial adviser, a spreadsheet, or an economist to explain the situation. You simply look at the thermostat, look at the outdoor temperature, and say, “We’re turning this damn thing off.” Tonight was one of those nights. With the temperature hovering around 73 degrees and virtually no humidity, there was no reason to seal ourselves inside a mechanically conditioned environment when nature had finally decided to provide us with better air for free. We opened things up, let the house breathe, and immediately the entire evening seemed to change character.
The dogs, naturally, interpreted this as an invitation to begin an entirely separate Saturday-night celebration.
We let Bentley and Davey out onto the property, and within seconds they were gone, charging off across our 65 acres with the sort of enthusiasm that suggests they had been personally imprisoned for the preceding several decades rather than spending the day at home with two adults who had been working and golfing. Watching dogs run on that much land is one of the great pleasures of living where we do. They don’t merely walk outside. They disappear into the landscape. One moment you can see them, and the next they are somewhere beyond the trees, racing after some scent that only a dog could possibly consider worthy of immediate investigation. Every so often one of them reappears, usually moving considerably faster than seems physiologically necessary, looking for all the world like he has just returned from an important expedition and expects us to be impressed.
While the dogs conducted their wilderness operations, Sadie and I went swimming in our pond. There is something particularly pleasant about swimming outside on a cool late-August evening, especially after a long day. The water felt wonderful, and for a little while there was nothing particularly complicated about life. We weren’t doctors, paramedics, volunteers, administrators, golfers, or anything else. We were simply two people floating around in a pond on a beautiful Saturday evening, enjoying the fact that the calendar had given us permission to slow down for a few hours.
Afterward, we dried off and settled into the evening. We had a hookah, spent some time outside, and played with the dogs whenever they happened to come barreling back into civilization. There was also an ulterior motive behind all of this interaction with the dogs: we were trying to wear them out. Anyone who owns large, energetic dogs understands the strategy. You don’t simply hope they’ll become tired. You actively work toward the desired physiologic endpoint. You run them, play with them, let them explore, throw things, chase things, encourage them to expend every available reserve of enthusiasm, and then you pray that when you eventually bring them inside, they will collapse somewhere comfortable and remain there. We had ambitions for a peaceful movie night, and Bentley and Davey were therefore being subjected to what amounted to an informal endurance-training program.
Meanwhile, the most important culinary project of the evening had already been underway.
We have an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven, and Sadie had wisely started preparing everything while I was off playing golf and she was doing the grocery shopping. She had already made the dough, and she had put wood into the oven and gotten the fire going so that by the time I returned home, the oven would be approaching the proper temperature. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about a wood-fired pizza oven. We have refrigerators, convection ovens, microwaves, induction cooktops, sophisticated kitchen appliances, and all the other conveniences of modern life, yet somehow we still find ourselves standing outside feeding pieces of wood into a fire because apparently pizza tastes better when you’ve made the process unnecessarily complicated.
And, of course, it does.
There is a particular smell that comes from a wood-fired oven heating up, a mixture of smoke, burning hardwood, and the anticipation of food that is about to be spectacularly unhealthy in exactly the right way. By the time we start making the pizzas, the oven will be roaring, the interior will be radiating heat, and the dough will go from a pale, innocent-looking circle to a blistered, browned, bubbling piece of edible happiness in a matter of minutes. We are going to make several pizzas tonight, because there is no such thing as making “a pizza” when you have an outdoor pizza oven. You make several. You experiment. You put different things on them. You eat slices standing around outside. You tell yourself you’re finished, then look at the remaining pizza and decide that throwing it away would be wasteful. Eventually you realize you’ve eaten enough pizza to require its own gravitational field.
After that comes the real event: 1990s movie night.
We currently have three movies sitting out and ready to go: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Cruel Intentions. There are also two additional contenders waiting in reserve, The Usual Suspects and Ronin. Whether we actually make it through all five remains questionable, although we have made the rookie mistake of drinking quite a lot of coffee. That means the evening could theoretically become considerably longer than originally intended. There is always something slightly dangerous about saying, “We’ll just watch one movie,” when you have coffee, snacks, comfortable furniture, a wife who also appreciates 1990s cinema, and an assortment of movies that you haven’t seen in a while. One movie becomes two, two becomes three, and suddenly you are looking at the clock wondering why birds are beginning to make noises outside.
The snacks, naturally, are already lined up.
We have powdered donuts, glazed donuts, and pistachio nut ice cream, because apparently tonight’s nutritional philosophy is that if something contains sugar and makes you happy, it qualifies. The pistachio ice cream is particularly important to me because it has become one of those small traditions that connects adulthood with childhood in a way that is almost embarrassingly simple. I inherited my affection for pistachio nut ice cream from my father, Roger, and whenever I eat it, I am reminded of Saturday nights growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
Back then, Saturday night movies were a different experience. There was no streaming service presenting an infinite grid of thumbnails. There wasn’t a television in every room, and you certainly didn’t have a little glowing rectangle in your pocket containing essentially every piece of entertainment humanity has ever produced. We watched what was on television, rented movies, or eventually bought them, and when a movie was playing that everybody wanted to see, you sat down and watched it. My father and I had a particular Saturday-night routine, and my mother and brother would sometimes join us and sometimes disappear to do their own thing. But my father almost always had two things with him: milk with ice and pistachio nut ice cream.
The milk with ice became its own little ritual. My father would pour the milk, put ice into it, and say, with the satisfaction of a man who had discovered one of life’s great secrets, “Milk with ice, nice.” It was one of those little sayings that probably seemed completely ordinary at the time but somehow survives decades later, preserved not because it was profound, but precisely because it wasn’t. Childhood memories rarely announce themselves as important while you’re living them. You don’t realize that sitting on a couch with your father, eating pistachio ice cream and watching a movie on a Saturday night, is something you’ll remember when you’re 44 years old. You simply live it.
Then one day, years later, you find yourself sitting in your own house on a Saturday night, eating pistachio ice cream while a 1990s movie is waiting to be played, and you realize that some things have followed you all the way through life.
Tonight, I have the pistachio ice cream.
And I have the milk with ice.
Nice.
There is something comforting about those little continuities. Life changes enormously between childhood and adulthood. Careers happen. People move. Houses change. Responsibilities accumulate. Parents grow older, friends come and go, and eventually you find yourself looking backward at decades that once seemed impossibly far away. Yet every now and then, something as insignificant as a bowl of pistachio ice cream manages to collapse the distance between then and now. For a moment, you’re not a grown man sitting in his house at the end of August. You’re just a kid watching a movie with his father on a Saturday night, waiting to see what happens next.
Meanwhile, there is another member of the household who seems less than thrilled about this evening’s arrangement, and that would be Schnitzel.
Our orange tabby cat has developed certain expectations regarding Saturday nights, and apparently those expectations involve having the house to himself. Ordinarily, Sadie and I might go out to dinner, attend an event, meet people, or otherwise leave the premises for several hours. Schnitzel, in his mind, presumably considers this a perfectly reasonable arrangement. He gets the house, the furniture, the quiet, and the opportunity to move through the property without two humans constantly appearing in the same rooms as him. Tonight, however, we have committed the unforgivable offense of staying home.
I suspect he is not pleased.
Cats are remarkable creatures in this regard. You can provide them with food, water, warmth, shelter, toys, affection, medical care, and an objectively excellent life, and they will still occasionally look at you as though you have personally violated an international treaty by sitting in the wrong chair. Schnitzel has spent part of the evening observing us with the unmistakable expression of a cat who would prefer that his tenants leave the premises. I suppose he will have to endure the indignity of having his people home tonight. Perhaps he’ll eventually discover that 1990s movies are culturally enriching.
The dogs, on the other hand, are still somewhere outside.
At some point we’ll call them in, and the hope is that the combination of running across 65 acres, swimming, playing, and whatever other adventures they have invented will finally have exhausted them. Ideally, they will wander inside, drink approximately the volume of Lake Erie in water, collapse on the floor, and remain unconscious for the duration of the first movie. This is the dream. Whether reality cooperates is another question entirely.
As I write this, Sadie has just finished her shower, which means the evening is officially moving into its next phase. I still need to take mine, and then the sequence of events is pretty well established: pizza, snacks, more gummies, ice cream, coffee we probably shouldn’t have consumed, and a long parade of 1990s movies. We started taking gummies about an hour ago, and we’re probably going to take a few more later, which means the combination of wood-fired pizza, pistachio ice cream, nostalgic movies, and a chemically enhanced appreciation for cinema could make for a rather entertaining evening. I have no idea whether Reservoir Dogs will be followed by Pulp Fiction or whether we’ll wander into Cruel Intentions and then somehow end up watching Ronin at an hour when sensible people have long since gone to bed. That is tomorrow’s problem.
Tonight belongs to Saturday.
And honestly, this is exactly the sort of Saturday evening I love. There is no grand adventure planned, no expensive reservation, no elaborate itinerary, and no particular reason to make the night into anything more than what it naturally wants to be. We worked. We volunteered. We helped our town. I played a round of golf. Sadie did the shopping. We swam in our pond. The dogs ran across the property. The house is cool because we finally gave the air conditioners a rest. There is a fire burning in the pizza oven, the dough is ready, the movies are stacked up, and there is pistachio ice cream waiting in the freezer.
Outside, the last weekend of August is quietly slipping toward September. The evenings are beginning to cool, the summer light is fading a little earlier, and somewhere beyond the trees the dogs are probably conducting one final inspection of the property before we summon them back inside. Soon the pizza oven will be glowing, we’ll be sitting down with plates in our laps, and some movie made thirty years ago will be playing on the television while we eat enough junk food to make tomorrow’s breakfast almost irrelevant.
And perhaps that is what makes these evenings so good. They aren’t trying to become memories. They simply are, while you’re living them.
So, friends, I’m going to take my shower, because apparently even a Saturday night requires a certain minimum standard of hygiene, and then we’re lighting up the pizza oven, calling in the dogs, annoying Schnitzel by continuing to exist in his house, opening the ice cream, and starting our little journey back to the 1990s.
Pizza, pistachio ice cream, milk with ice, gummies, dogs, a grumpy cat, and Tarantino.
Honestly, I can’t think of a better way to spend the last Saturday night of August.
Happy Saturday, friends.
Thoughts in Harmony 