Some days, I wish I was back in school. I’m not talking about those three days I went to college or even high school. I’m talking about grade school, that golden time between diapers and acne.
It’s not that I want to play on the swings or carry a lunch box — I can do those things any time I want, thank you very much, because I’m a grown-up with my own money and everything.
No, what calls me back to the playground is the fact that the school year is coming to a close and brother, there’s nothing better than the last bell to mark the last hour of the last day.
Not that it gets all the way to the final bell. As I remember it, you skip to class on that final day with some expectation that it will be a short one. No book reports to read, no confusing words to spell and certainly no homework.
The last day of school is typically spent cleaning out your cubby and washing a year’s worth of scribbles off the desktop. Every time I sniff the industrial soap they use in school, it’s an instant flashback. Doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing.
I might be yawning through a long meeting at City Hall and if a janitor wheels by and the smell of soap is on the air, I’ll run outside with no coat on and start turning cartwheels in the street. It’s gotten to the point where my editors won’t assign me to City Council meetings in the spring anymore because they’re tired of having to go back and explain my behavior to the mayor.
Cleaning out your desk was an exercise in young nostalgia. Look! Here’s a love letter you wrote to Becky, that fourth-grade goddess, but which you never got around to giving to her.
The paper has been folded a dozen times so that it’s as hard as a stone and it will take the recipient a full hour to open. It’s got the requisite ML+BL written on the side along with cryptic childhood codes such as TLA and TLF. If you don’t know what those mean, you’ve never been in love with a girl named Becky and I feel bad for you.
Oh, look! Here’s another love letter, this one addressed to Susan. And another for Elizabeth and one for Lisa. That really was a good year, wasn’t it?
There’s another tightly folded letter deep in the back of your desk and this one is addressed simply to “New Girl.” You remember it now. She was the pretty redhead who moved here from Scarsdale and with whom you were madly in love for two full weeks. Too bad she moved to Cleveland a month later because buddy, I think that one was for real.
It’s a meteorological improbability, but I don’t recall a single last day of school during which it rained. In the edited-for-content versions of my memory, every one of those days was filled with sunshine. The sky a deep and perfect blue, the temperature never creeping above or below 75 degrees. Dogs chased butterflies; birds sang in trees; the cafeteria lady served prime rib and lobster for lunch.
Few things compare to the last day of school when you’re old enough to wander but still too young to have a job. When you’re young, summers seem as hot and endless as a sunbeam — three-plus months during which you don’t have to read so much as the back of a cereal box and you’ll never be called to the chalkboard to point out useless things like nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Not to mention gerunds. My God, how you hated gerunds. But on summer vacation, there are no such things. There are Whiffle ball games, water slides and tree forts and you can say “ain’t” all you want. And chew gum without being treated as a potential terrorist.
On the last day of school, vacation hasn’t even started yet. It’s all out there ahead of you, the dangling carrot you chased all those mornings you trudged through 3 feet of snow just to get to a place where they made you do math and calisthenics.
On the last day of school, you found a way to listen to that euphoric Alice Cooper song. And if you couldn’t pilfer the cassette tape from your older brother’s collection, you just went around singing it every chance you got.
“No more pencils, no more books,
No more teachers’ dirty looks.
Out for summer, out ’til fall.
We might not go back at all.”
And so on. Kids are so lucky. Summer is still bright with endless and yet undefined joys. Summer is like a grand pinata filled with treasure just waiting to be whacked. Anything can happen once the calendar page flips to June. This might be the summer you get your first kiss or finally knock one over the fence at Peter’s Field and get to round the bases.
Make it a slow trot, boy, because you’ll be amazed at how much faster those calendar pages flip with each new year. Before you know it, there will be summer jobs, college applications and an endless barrage of yuck coming at you. You’ll wake up one morning and you’re a bitter grown-up writing about the things you miss and chasing the janitor around so you can huff his soap.
It’s just sad. Plus Alice Cooper is eventually going to come after you for using his lyrics without written consent. I tell you, being an adult is just fraught with unpleasantness.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can spare him the yuck at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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