Naming summers – the summer of love comes quickly to mind. Two summers ago was the summer when half of my friends left St. Louis and the other half got business cards. Last summer was a summer I’d just assume forget. For me it was a summer with a great deal of personal loss. I think I can safely say that in many ways last year was the worst year I have experienced in this life. That summer the new agers that surround me would say things like, “It’s amazing how many people are leaving the planet right now.” This summer is turning into a summer of leaving as well, not the planet, but one’s partners.

This past Friday I went to what was ostensibly a birthday party for my friend John’s sister Megan. It was in reality a separation party of sorts for John and Rebecca, complete with the ironic gesture of using their leftover wedding napkins for the h’orderves. The separation seems amicable enough, but neither of them were in the same room during the entire party. Hannah and Dave hope to have their sudden divorce settled by Christmas, she has already sold the ring and wants Dave to sell the house, which seems unlikely and may be the first in a long line of points of contention. Vanessa and I tried to convey last night that our precocious and over-compensating-ly adjusted AJ will be giving up a fair amount of things in the near future and perhaps her room could wait a bit, but to attempt to reason with a Hannah in her cups does smack of self-indulgent lunacy.

Doug and Jeff in New York are no longer an institution, dividing the worlds largest CD collection between them. Their old house in the ville burned down as an intuitive precursor. Chris and Christine, who met through my ill-fated introduction, still living in the ville, have severed their connections such as they are able to with young Rowan in common. Jack and Diane split last night with plenty of tears spilt at Wildflower Café to christen his morning departure for California. Anne’s ex Mat just left for California today as well, and she sits to my left despondent that in the year since they broke up he has managed to grow up, just in time to depart. My ex has recently moved to Columbia, but we haven’t spoken in nearly two years now so I suppose my involvement in this summer of leaving is only incidental.

I am leaving for California this Friday, but I’ll be returning in ten days with Mary and all her worldly possessions. For me this will be a retracing a trip of my youth, when I moved out to California in 1991 like Mat, with all my belongings trimmed down to fit into my car. I didn’t have a good go of it then, as California was just descending into recession and you needed a college degree to get a job at Burger King. I moved back after six months, unable to make a good go of it there. I came back to the Midwest and enrolled in college, finding that many of the new instructors had fled the collapsing Californian college system, where humanities instructors were seen as intellectual fat fit for trimming. It wasn’t what I had planned, but driving the country there and back did air me out in a much-needed fashion and I hope this road trip will do something of the same, put a breeze in my hair and help me leave all this leaving behind.