My Dearest August

Every year, I confuse June and July.  This simple alliteration trips me up, and from May to August I am calendar challenged.  I plan things for June, but write them down for July, and vice versa.  Thinking of these dates in numerical form doesn’t help.  Any occurrence in the 6^thor 7^thmonth of the year reduces me to slowly counting on my fingers like a child learning to navigate from 1 to 10.

I consider myself an intelligent person.  I went to college; I know how to use the self-checkout line.  I can add and read and write.  Every so often I dare to dive into deeper thinking.  Yet for 61 days in the middle of every year I am incapable of comprehending our progression of time in the increments of days, weeks, and these two, baffling months. 

One of my favorite essay collections is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.  The title essay describes a patient of the neurologist who, when leaving the doctor’s office, begins pulling at his wife’s head, believing it to be his hat.  It sounds ridiculous, and sadly comical.  This is what I feel like when I’m standing in the kitchen, staring at the Sell By date on a pack of hotdogs and wondering if it is safe to feed them to my children.  I walk to the calendar.  The calendar says June.  The hotdogs say Jul1911.  Almost expired, I think.  Or, already a month expired?  But no, July comes after, and the hotdogs say June.  Then I look at the Sell By date again.  It implies July.  I’m confused, I spend another few minutes trying to decipher time as it relates to this processed meat product I’m about to feed my kids.  I’m stymied.  Macaroni and cheese, it is. 

My mind is intact.  So it is, also thought the man who mistook his wife for a hat.  I put him from my mind, disregard my glitch, and pine for August.