Wheatzie

Every year at the start of August*, when my pool days are dwindling and I’m getting the itch to get back into my classroom to set up, I begin to think, with a mixture of summer nostalgia and a touch of excitement for fall, of my favorite summer memories… …like the July several years ago when my dad got a tick on his back and allowed it to suckle until it was as fat as a pulsating cantaloupe because his metal spatula, as he explained later, wasn’t long enough to reach it and scrape it off.   So he decided to just “let it hang out for a while,” naming it Omar and using the spatula as a mirror so he could say hi to Omar’s reflection when he “felt a little lonely.” (My dad is a bachelor and all of us kids are long out of the house but don’t let him fool you when he’s trying to gain sympathy or attention—he prefers it that way until he has a tick stuck to his back.) My brothers and sisters and I didn’t know anything about Omar, but we began to get a bit concerned when we would visit Dad