The folkloric tandem of July and August ends, and relaxing September arrives. The September vacationer hates people but loves the places everyone else visits during the rest of the summer. They hate lines, outrageous prices, and crowded festivals. They like empty beaches, being able to get a table without a reservation, and, when it rains, they always say, “This has its charm, too.” They are less demanding of the locals, more patient, and happy with simple pleasures such as reading on the beach, while despising the summer vacation lifestyle, which invariably includes kayaks, fights at attractions such as mechanical-bull rides, and visits to urgent-care clinics where everyone is either on vacation, on sick leave, or both.
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The Small Business Owner
Yes, I know. Small-business owners never get sick, never take days off, and if someone in the family dies — God forbid — we say goodbye to them at the funeral home with a laptop under our arm. We are easily recognized by our faces on Saturdays, holidays, and summer days when, theoretically, nobody is working. We are easy to recognize: we look like we’ve been through the wringer.
Even so, our summer routine includes brief incursions onto the beach, squeezed into the day between meetings, phone calls, and various obligations. This is what allows us, during the summer, to disguise somewhat the pallor we have accumulated during the rest of the year. We choose September because it is a stupid time of year to take a vacation, and because, in any case, our workload never changes. The calendar is irrelevant.
You can spot us easily in September because we are always dressed inappropriately for wherever we happen to be. We may turn up at the beach in a suit or, worse, arrive at the coworking café in swim trunks. These places, once designed for people who actually had jobs, have now been installed everywhere.
The small-business owner tips, reads the fine print on receipts, carries two cell phones, and, when he gets carried away with the gin and tonics, orders another round and shouts, “Screw it all!” The next morning, after checking his bank statement, he cancels the vacation.
Distant Family
Everyone has a distant cousin or uncle who escapes the city in September and comes to “visit the family” in some small town or remote corner of the country, despite having no contact with the relatives who host him for the rest of the year. They still arrive as if they were descending a step from their superior civilization into our humble lands. Kind words, smiles, and all that, but in reality, they are simply eager to venture to the outskirts, take a selfie with a cow, and post on Instagram: “Family and rural life, what more could I ask for?” It would be rude to reply publicly, “Paying the rent.”
Their other great vice is food, and they make no attempt to hide it. If it is at home, they are always the first to show up at cocktail hour, ostensibly to socialize but really to distract whoever is cooking. You love them because they are family, but you don’t exactly miss them when, with great sadness, they return to their burrow — although not all of them do, and sometimes you have to call in pest control.
The European Retiree
It is unfair to focus exclusively on Europe, although Europe is full of those strange countries that seem to produce more retirees than workers.
Their vacations are peaceful: a sweater with little pills on it, a thoughtful gaze toward the ocean, and a seafood feast in the middle of the afternoon. The real problem with the foreign retiree is alcohol.
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They begin the day alone, like all September vacationers, but as the drinks go down, they begin conversing with a large number of people who do not exist. They do so in their native languages, so when it sounds like two sheets of metal being twisted together, it is German; when it sounds like a pirate marinated in rum, it is English; and when it sounds vaguely like French, only less affected, it is Swiss, Dutch, Danish, or some other European language belonging to a country you could not locate on a map.
It is never Russian, unless the man looks as though he keeps corpses preserved in formaldehyde in the trunk of his car.
The New Hippie Retiree
A long-lived species, remarkably resistant to the passage of time, is the retiree who transforms himself into a new hippie.
He is hated by local business owners because, despite having just collected a golden retirement package after 40 years in senior management at multinational corporations, he belongs to the Brotherhood of the Stingy with almost religious fervor. He is convinced that every dollar he spends outside his RV is a blow to the very heart of the natural world. I should clarify: he is not remotely concerned about his contribution to the extinction of cannabis, which he consumes enthusiastically around his campsite.
The New Hippie Retiree does not communicate with anyone. He surfs, talks to animals, dresses like a man who has just emerged from a Woodstock reenactment, and keeps tech equipment in his RV worth approximately 10 years of your salary.
He never attends local festivals unless there is free food. He uses the bathrooms at beach bars, showers on the beach, and stays for three or four weeks, which is roughly how long it takes him to realize that the locals have begun confusing him with a homeless person. Then he moves on to the next stretch of coastline and starts the whole process again.
Affable and permanently smiling, he supplements his retirement income with rent from half a dozen properties back home. This is why he openly declares himself a communist, as demonstrated by the collection of political stickers covering his decrepit RV. He claims to fight for peace and against war. But the only battle he wages with conviction and consistency is against soap.
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