Season of Smaller Stuff

There’s a story a friend of mine likes to tell, in which a man is asked how he and his wife handle priorities.

“Well,” the man replies, “it’s quite simple, actually. I make all the big decisions--how we should invest, how we should vote, what U.S. policy should be toward China. And my wife handles all the rest--what we should eat, where we should take our vacations, how we should live. You know. The smaller stuff.”

My friend always roars with laughter when he gets to that last line--”the smaller stuff.” Smart guy, my friend. He and his wife are on vacation this week, handling the priorities of summer, the season of smaller stuff.

The kitchen calendar says there’s not much left of this season. August is down now to the last, lonely couple of squares. Sometime after Labor Day, the courts and schools and government bodies will rouse themselves from their air-conditioned doldrums, and the nation’s big-decision-makers will get back to work.

Too bad. There’s a certain centeredness that transpires when the movers and shakers are all off summering at the Cape, or taking houses in Tuscany or doing whatever people who “summer” and “take houses” do. Bereft of an agenda, we are forced to fall back on the smaller stuff: Zucchini recipes. Family camp-outs. Getting one good photo for this year’s Christmas card.

Granted, this level of discourse is not for everyone, and sometimes, the smaller stuff is smaller than you’d like. You open your paper only to find that the big news of the day is “O.J.’s Mom Sick” or “Sex Slave Can’t Sue Sultan of Brunei.”

This happens so predictably that newspaper people have dubbed this time of year “the silly season” for the caliber of events that tend to pass as news. And yet, it might be refreshing, just for once, to read a headline like “News Takes a Holiday; Life Goes On.” Somehow, those words look less silly and less small.

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One thing you can say about this waning season is that big thoughts on it are as hard to come up with as non-silly news. Our own vacation from big decisions involved so much silliness that if I went into detail, no self-respecting house-taking summerer would speak to me.

Suffice it to say that there were long days at beaches and much rounding up of kids for potential Christmas card shots. Here we are, now in a restaurant, now on a hike, some of us smiling, some eating, some looking off into the middle distance, some smearing food in our hair.

Once, when I was being rounded up for my own parents’ group portraits, I was repelled by the ordinariness of vacations like these. The destinations seemed silly. And the family photos never showed, for instance, that as the shutter clicked, your lame brother was flexing his scrawny pectoral muscles and your Uncle Joe was drunk as usual. Or that this vacation was turning into a repeat of last year’s, only with different scenery.

Only people with too much time on their hands would organize vacations like these, I thought then. These were the pastimes of small-stuff types, of grasshoppers, and the big-stuff future, in my opinion, belonged to the ants.

Now, as vacations and summers and entire decades fly by, those distinctions aren’t so clear. The “grasshoppers” who handled the stuff of our memories seem to have been the farsighted ones, their scrapbooks something to store up against a coming chill.

What does it mean that, by comparison, the big, public decisions seem now to reflect only the smallest facets of humanity? More and more, such affairs seem to boil down to the same old flexing and failing. This year’s big issues turn out to be a repeat of last year’s, only with different scenery.

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One night, toward the end of our vacation, we looked out over the ocean and there were so few city lights that you could see the Milky Way. The stars were the size of pinpoints, and yet, close up, each little sparkle was a colossal explosion--a sort of cosmic news flash from the universe.

The world seemed bigger than the biggest thing anyone could imagine, and yet small enough to fit into a snapshot in which two people hold hands under the stars on a summer night. If you weren’t there, you’d never know that, as the shutter clicked, those two people were talking sheer silliness.

Periodically, one or the other of them would roar with laughter of a sort that, frankly, tends not to spring up around weighty affairs. Finance, politics, foreign relations and big decisions did not, on that evening, come up.

The fact is, on a certain kind of night in August, you’d be surprised at the things to talk about: What to eat. Where to take your next vacation. How to live.

You know, the smaller stuff.

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawnhubler@latimes.com