If summer had to end - and I guess it had to - John and I ended it on a good weekend.

Friday I took the day off and he and Gretchen and I went to Hardy to play in the river. First we drove up to Mammoth Springs and waded around a little there. You wouldn't think so much water could be so painfully cold, but it was. I went in up to my ankles and got the chills. I couldn't imagine submerging my whole body in it.

We were going to go tubing, but one place said we'd have to paddle for a while (uh-uh) and another place said we'd have to walk back to the car (no way). So we ended up just playing in the river. The river had wrapped around a small island at one point; this made for a fast current and a three foot standing wave. John went through it five or six times in his life jacket, bouncing over the wave and laughing his ass off.

***

When we were leaving I was holding up one of Gretchen's gigantic bath sheets so she could change. On my side were the few campers at the campground. The river on Gretchen's side was deserted.

So of course she had no pants on when a canoe came skittering around the little island.

"Uh," I said, "there's a canoe."

She wrapped the towel around herself, laughed, and waved at the guys in the canoe. They seemed very pleased with the whole thing.

***

Yesterday John and I went to the Rock and Romp in Minglewood Hall. I like the Rock and Romp, because for five bucks I get all the barbecue and beer I can eat. The caveat there is that you have to arrive promptly at the start time, or the lines will be outrageous or - much worse - the beer and meat will be gone altogether.

John, I think, is getting iffy about the Rock and Romps, though. There's tons of kids there, of course, and John doesn't usually have any trouble making the kind of temporary insta-friends the way kids do. He has a hard time with the Rock and Romps for some reason. After an hour or so he came back to where I was sitting, saying he couldn't find anyone who would play with him.

The Overinvolved Father in me wanted to catch some passing kid, shake the shit out of them, and say "do you not realize how awesome John is? How lucky you are that he wants to play with you? Take him into your circle and consider yourself blessed!" But the more realistic me knows that kids are clique-ish, and that most of those midtown kids go to school together, and John really is kind of an outsider.

Not that that upsets him. He told me he was hungry, but he's not a barbecue man. So we went to Toro Loco and he ate a couple of quesadillas. Then we went to Overton Park, where he effortlessly joined a group of kids on the playground.

***

When we got home last night we were watching a little wrestling. Brock Lesnar was on, sporting a vicious midwestern farm boy high and tight.

"We need to cut your hair like that," I told John. He immediately went for it. So we did.

***

It's been an excellent summer. Lots of swimming and in-pool beer drinking. A couple of trips to Hardy. My big birthday trip to Missouri and the long float down the Current River in a PBR haze. Fireworks. Yard work. Time with friends and family. Lazy Sunday afternoons with the girlfriend. I turned forty. Memorable stuff.

I've been reading the back issues of a local blog Sassy Molassy - I don't know her, but I think we have some people in common) and I noticed in her stuff from late in 2009 and early in 2010 she mentions several times how cold it was.

It was, too. Cold, and cold for weeks on end. Usually in Memphis we get breaks from the cold in the wintertime. Maybe a warm day with a gusty wind from the south or a stretch of mild-and-rainy, but they didn't seem to happen much that winter.

I remember people coming to the house to watch a football game one Saturday night in December and they all came in shivering with their teeth chattering. I poured them all little cups of Evan Williams Honey Reserve and they were all grateful for it. Christmas day was icy cold, with a bright blue sky and a north wind that didn't care if you were wearing a coat.

And January? Fucking January. They day my grandmother died was bleak, bleak. A cold-iron sky and useless little spatters of snow. It was sunny at her funeral, but the wind at the little cemetery outside Tyronza blows hard on even the mildest days. That wasn't a mild day.

And at the time three of the four power windows in my old Volvo were broken, so as I'd drive they'd slowly slide down. By the time I got to work all three of them would be open a couple of inches. I'd turn the heater all the way up and keep my gloves and hat on for the whole trip.

One day in February Sonya and I went to lunch in her car. On the way back she was smoking, with her window down. That was cold.

Super Bowl Sunday when the Saints finally, blessedly won? So damn cold. It snowed that night, a real live surprise snow that kept me home from work the next day.

Towards the end of February I went out dancing (on a night when I couldn't have felt less like dancing) and I left my coat in the car. The walk back to the car down Madison with the air hanging right around freezing.

I wasn't sleeping well, at all. I was always getting up to check on John, who usually cocooned himself. But sometimes I'd find him with the covers all kicked off, curled into a ball. I'd put the blankets back over him and I could see his whole body relax under the covers, warm again.

And when I came back to bed Dora would do the same thing every time: she would get up, let me get in bed and situated, and then she would plop her dog ass down against my hip and lay down, snug against the length of my right leg, watching the door to the bedroom. She knew something was up. I don't think she slept, because when I would get up in the night she would always look back at me as if to say, "all clear, boss. Everything's under control."

And then! In April the weather broke, firmly and finally. Warm and mild, open-window days, as if nature was saying "oops. Sorry about all that shit."