Commentary: The Dog Days of Summer are here. This time of year, the sun rides high up in the sky in our hemisphere. Nights get hotter and last longer. We squirm with discomfort from increasing heat and our clothes stick to us when we aren’t spending a small fortune to artificially cool ourselves with electrically processed air. Our pets look lethargic and seek a cool spot to lay on the floor to snooze. We wonder if we should join them.
So the Dog Days are bad, right? Not at all. In fact, they have nothing to do with dogs at all. They have nothing directly to do with the weather, either. What we humans call the Dog Star, or Sirius, rises into the night sky before our Sun toward the end of July and does so every year. The observant folks who came along before us noticed this and wanted to name this time of year something. Thus, the Dog Days was born.
But we humans began to care more about the extreme heat and discomfort we feel that is associated with this time of year. So we gave the Dog Days an undeserving poor reputation.
It’s time for us to set things right. We must restore the good reputation we stole from the Dog Days. They are actually a testament to the accurate and clever observations made by our wise ancestors. They are a mark of achievement and a testament to our amazing cosmos.
But it’s too cumbersome for us to redefine this time of year as The Days When The Star Sirius Rises Before Our Sun. In fact, we should just leave the star Sirius out of this altogether. If that star system has any inhabitants, they don’t look like us, they already call themselves by a far different name, and they wouldn’t know why we named them that anyway.
Sure it gets very hot these days. And more humid. But this is a wonderful time of year without any major holidays for us to spend money on that we haven’t got or requiring us to plan and worry about any big events that demand our attention. This should simply be a time of appreciation for our own solar star ball in the sky without which none of us would be here or be alive. But we can’t call this time of year Sunday because that’s already taken.
There is a famous song that begins, Summertime, and the living is easy. Another famous song goes, Lazy Day, just right for loving away. That music was meant for this time of year. I don’t know what we should call this season. But if you have a name that includes something about easy living and loving away then I think we’ve finally set things right.