It's never too soon to regret the summer we didn't have. Those pangs start now, once Memorial Day has passed, as summer already slips away, like losing your favorite sunglasses again, and wearing a new pair that never feels right, that you regret buying. Let's not wait and do this in the last week of August, let's regret summer now: All the nights we meant to eat outside, until we saw how long the wait was for a table. All our dirty furniture on the lanai, which is rather small, which we regret.

Teddy Kennedy has cancer in his brain and he's already been sailing once since he got home from the hospital, probably more. We regret that it's another summer and we still somehow don't know people who own boats. (Some of us, on the other hand, regret knowing these people. It sounds so much better in theory, until the day such people take you out on their boat and it turns out to be more work than your weekday job: Lift this, tie this, hold this. Everyone push on the count of three, etc. We see boats and see regret.)

Your wedding? We send our warmest regrets.

About the ocean: We regret it. We regret that shops have all those cute mix-and-match two-piece bathing suits, but no tops in our size anymore, already gone! And we regret that we never looked into the luxury rental that overlooks the ocean. (What we really regret? That we didn't have the money anyhow.)

We regret that it's so nice out and we still stayed inside, under the guise that we had to. We regret all the songs that are on the radio this summer, whatever they turn out to be, and we regret how much we listen to the '80s station.

We regret never having had our very own swimming pool. We regret a lot about pools, such as that feeling of wet concrete underfoot, and the smell of Coppertone, and the way the pages of a magazine get while you're reading at a pool. If we are ever in a pool this summer, we regret in advance that we will not glide like accomplished swimmers, and that we still splash around like a little kid.

We regret not having a tan, and we regret the tans we had.

We regret that we didn't plant what we should have already planted. We regret arriving late to the screening of the blockbuster movie at the theater, and having to watch it from the second row.

We regret farmers markets we never go to, even though they are two blocks away, every Saturday morning. We regret that our hair is not long enough for a really cute ponytail, to wear with the summer dress we regret not buying on sale at the end of last summer. We regret barbecues we meant to have and did not. We regret that the bottle of Heinz ketchup in the refrigerator has a sell-by date of March 2006, which means it didn't come out at all last summer, and probably won't this summer.

Romantic weekend getaways?

Summer lovin'?

Uh, well-uh, well-uh, well-uh — tell me less, tell me less ...