"Dear Diary: Guess what. It's summer!" That is the caption on a New Yorker  cartoon I cut from the magazine in 1982. It shows a woman sitting on a beach surrounded by people who are engaged in typical beach activities. She is under an umbrella, writing in her diary. It's supposed to be ironic, I guess -- the woman is observing life instead of living it, and I think that's why I am drawn to it, why I often photocopy it and paste it into my notebook each year. (It did not scan well, hence its absence here -- don't think I suddenly became super-scrupulous about copyright.)

I bumped into an acquaintance this afternoon at the strip mall on Route 39 where my daughter and I had gone to run errands. She used to live on our street, and was Lynn's piano teacher for a while. Her children, one of whom is in Lynn's class, were with her. "Well," she said, "how's your summer going?" Before I could say anything, like maybe "hello," she said, "But then, it's always summer for you!"

She was alluding to my status, now beginning its second year, as a retired teacher. A lot of people, I've come to understand this year, think "being retired" is synonymous with "having nothing to do," or perhaps "wanting nothing to do." A lot of those same people also make the assumption that I "got out of teaching" because I hated everything about it, except maybe the summers.

It should be noted here that my former neighbor survived exactly one year as a teacher before quitting to work at whatever office job became available while her husband was in law school, whereupon she too "retired" to have kids and stay home all the time. Therefore I can't figure out why she thinks it should be "summer all the time" for me any more than it is for her, nor what, indeed, she might mean.

The truth is, she didn't really want to know how my summer, or anything else in my life, is going -- she answered her own question and then breezed off, thinking, I suppose, that she knows something about me. And what if she'd stayed on the sidewalk in front of Mr. Deli long enough for me to answer? Here is what I would tell her.

So how is my summer going? Quite well, thank you. Vacation Bible School is over --  a week that kept me so busy I didn't have time to update My Letter to the World. I began this first day of summer at 7:00, well after sunrise, with a half hour of breathing, stretching, and prayer. Then I took a walk -- one 20-minute loop around the neighborhood, followed by some time sitting quietly beside the pond. Then I had breakfast, read the paper, checked my e-mail (more than a hundred messages off one mailing list) and my site statistics (15 visitors yesterday for 45 page views) and plunged into the day's project.

A piece I wrote in February, "Annie and John", had been updated because of corrected information gleaned from a visit to John's gravesite. He's buried in a national military cemetery not far from here, the same army installation where he was stationed when he became acquainted with our family. While we were there we inquired at the office about how to contact his family -- my husband had found in his aunt's house John's class ring and an album of photos from his service in Africa, Italy, and France, and we sought to return these things to his children.

Privacy rules dictate that the cemetery administration contact John's family with our request. On Saturday we received a phone call from John's oldest son -- my husband knew the voice instantly, so reminiscent was it of John's. So this morning each of us wrote a note to the family. In addition, I prepared an essay version of the piece I'd written for this site and made scanned copies of some Petrucci family snapshots which show John's framed portrait on an end table. It was a labor of love, but it took three hours, not including the trip to Mail Boxes Etc., where the whole package was entrusted to UPS for delivery in Baltimore tomorrow.

After lunch I answered some mail, made a list of things I want to write about this week, and started drafting a reply to a woman interested in one of my writing courses (who will probably read this piece first, actually, since she also joined my notify list -- I now have subscribers on THREE CONTINENTS!!). Then I decided to fold some laundry while I watched Another World, daytime's longest running soap opera, scheduled to go off the air at the end of this week.

The soap opera failed to hold my attention -- I was a faithful watcher from 1964 until about 1984, when I abruptly lost interest in the genre as a whole. I was hoping that this week would be devoted to a retrospective, but that was certainly not the case today. Watching it was like watching a program in a foreign language, so I turned it off.

I worked on the Summer issue of my Story Stream newsletter -- I know summer starts today, but I mailed the Spring issue on March 26, so I figure the end of this week will be all right. Then I went to the Giant (our local supermarket) for dinner supplies.

We had hamburgers, not pork chops, for dinner tonight. Guests at the table were two girls, sisters, who used to live in our neighborhood but now live in Arkansas. (Their mother reads this site -- everybody's fine, Mom!!). They're visiting for a few weeks before their camp experience begins. Table talk centered on individual food preferences (salad vs. potato chips as a complement to hamburgers), the behavior of our parakeet, what John's family might say when they get the package (especially since I forgot to enclose the essay which is referred to twice), and why Ricky Martin is so hot.

After dinner I watched the news, did some yoga, took a long hot shower, and then watched a Biography episode about Connie Francis. When it got dark my husband set up the telescope and the girls looked at the midsummer night's moon. Later I talked to the neighbor girl about where she wants to go to high school -- she'll be completing eight years of parochial school next year and must decide between the Catholic high school (from which I graduated) and the township public school, which my daughter will attend. She wants to be a veterinarian. My daughter wants to be a geneticist. The visiting girls declared ambitions as an obstetrician and an oceanographer. (Ah, not a teacher in the bunch!!)

At 9:45 I started working on this essay. It's after 11 now. All in all, it was a satisfying, productive day,  a harbinger of a great summer to come.

And I wonder how my former neighbor's summer is going.