Dislocation, continued

So now they're moving the Indianapolis 500 out of May, and this is where it gets weird.

(OK. So this is already plenty weird, and awful, and has the feel not of real life but of being trapped inside a bad Michael Bay film -- is there any other kind? -- about the end times. But this is weird-weird.)

Anyway, they are moving the 500 to August 23, hopefully, and here is where all this hits me where I live. I covered the 500 for almost 40 years as a professional journalist, and before that I was a kid watching the Day-Glo gleam of the STP turbine pierce the gloom of a certain gray Saturday, and getting soaked to the skin by a cloudburst on another day when Bobby Unser won a rain-shortened 500.

Half my life is measured by months of May. But ... August?

August is for sweating out the equatorial heat of an Indiana summer, and watching your grass turn to shredded wheat, and NFL training camps. It's for the dog days of the baseball season, with my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates already well out of it (again!). It's for back-to-school sales and last days at the lake and the realization that, come Labor Day, the fun is over and it's back to breathing chalk dust in some musty classroom.

May?

May is Indy. Forever and ever.

Here's how far back forever goes: The first 500 went off on May 30, 1911. And how far back is that?

Well ... William Howard Taft was president.

The Titanic was under construction in Belfast, and was still 11 months away from its appointment with the iceberg.

Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium didn't exist.

Ty Cobb was 24 years old. Babe Ruth was 16. Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams had yet to be born. And Satchel Paige, forever ageless, was all of four years old.

In all the years from then to now, 109 of them, the Indianapolis 500 was run in May. Preparations for it occupied the entire month, which is how the Month of May came to be its trademark term. The place went from Ray Harroun tearing around the bricks at 75 mph to Simon Pagenaud tearing around asphalt at 230, and yet it was always in May, always that turbulent month when you could feel summer coming one day, and March making a late rally the next.

Radio, TV, commercial air flight and the worldwide web happened, as all those Mays fluttered past. Two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the war(s) in Iraq and Afghanistan happened. December 7 and September 11 became more than dates on a calendar. We made it through a Great Depression, a Cold War, the '60s and disco.

And every year, there was the Month of May. Every year, there was Harroun and Billy Arnold and Louis Meyer and Wilbur Shaw, Bill Vukovich and A.J. and Parnelli and Mario. And Miller-Fords and Deusenbergs and Offies and Novis and Lotus-Fords -- and, yes, Pratt-and-Whitney turbines, too.

And now, all of that moves to August, hopefully, for the first time ever. And May has a hole in it nothing can fill, as so much else about our lives has a hole in it these days.

So weird. So very, very weird.