Fourth of July 2017

Arizona Weather – It’s settling into a high range from about 108 to 115 and is just now showing signs of the higher humidity that signals the start of the monsoon. We don’t need a weatherperson (Have you noticed how many of these people are now women?) to tell us about rising humidity. Our bathroom door tells us as it makes louder and louder shrieks as it get tighter and tighter in its frame. Something about summer heat and the movement through July has always depressed me: Beginning on June 21, the first day of summer, the days get shorter and shorter. Just like life. We’re on the downside of the year and I’m on the downside of my life. How depressing.

Today is the Fourth of July and we have few celebratory plans. We’ll go out for dinner to Carrabba’s, just as we’ve done every Tuesday for the past year, and we’ll probably watch the Macy’s Fireworks Spectacular even though another second-hand sight of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of incendiary stuff no longer turns us on. And this year, we feel that our nation’s image to the rest of the world has suffered so much from the White House Bumbler that these fireworks are a grim reminder of North Korea’s threats of long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at us. I noticed a mention in USA Today that 35 of Trump’s 165 days in office have been spent at one or more of his golf courses. That’s a lot of time spent on golf and a lot of money spent on security while he’s taking these golf breaks. If he continues at this rate for his first year, he will have been on one of his golf properties seventy-seven times. Don’t you have more important things to do, Donald?

More on golf. Danielle Kang won the women’s PGA last weekend. What a gutsy final round she had, and what a refreshing newcomer to the ranks of major winners. I hope she wasn’t a flash in the pan and we see more of her in the future. The Open at Royal Birkdale Golf Club is only a week and a half away, another Open without Tiger. How sad that he now admits he has a problem with pain medication. How sad that we’ll never again see him tee it up in a professional golf event. But we can feast on the battle of the Big Six at Royal Birkdale—Dustin Johnson, Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Rory McElroy, Rickie Fowler, and—Yes!—finally, a Sergio Garcia who replaces Bubba in this scintillating sextet.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Let’s hope the second half of this year will show us less Trump golf and more Trump sanity.