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I've come to get irritated at the attack on the Second Amendment with these questions given to me when I go with one of my children to the doctors' office, which is Plymouth Pediatrics in Plymouth, NH.

The first question is whether the home is a gun-free home, along the lines of is it a smoke-free home. Then, failing that question, they want to know if the guns are locked up at all times.

Seemingly fair enough.

Yet, not so fast.

Here it is, the closing hours of Labor day, the unofficial end of summer.

It's always a bittersweet time for me, seeing the yearly wonders summer brings coming to an end.

In days the local beach will be closed.

The boating season may well run for another month or so, but it won't be the same. No one will be anchoring to do some swimming. Boats won't be towing waterskiers, wakeboards, or tubes behind them.

Many of the waterfront eateries and amusements will be shutting down during the weekdays and not long from now will be closed until next summer. And not long after that the diehard boaters (like me) will be pulling our boats from the water and getting them ready for winter storage.

Another summer will fade away, to live on only in our memories. It is these that will sustain us through the coming winter, reliving some of the great moments of this wonderful summer.

And as always happens this weekend, Don Henley's Boys Of Summer runs through my mind, with almost every line evoking the very feelings the end of summer entails.



It's been a great summer, one of the best in a long time. It only ended too soon for many of us.

I usually don't talk like that. But that's what I said yesterday when I glanced at the cover of the Laconia Daily Sun newspaper and saw a front-page photo of my six-year-old daughter. I usually teach my children, "Oh, my goodness!"

Even though she had warned me about it, when I picked up the paper at the Meredith library, where I got an Orson Scott Card fantasy thriller, the third installment of Brent Ghelfi's increasingly compelling Volk series, and a couple of musical CDs featuring Robert Schumann, I didn't even bother to take a look. It was only when I had returned home that I did, prompting my wife (who's home this week) to think someone had died.

Seeing one's child on the front page is often not a good thing. But I've been lucky with the behavior of my progeny thus far. I am terrified when they become teenagers, however. Esp. the girl--she's way too pretty.