Skool

I don't remember when it was that I actually got over my Pavlovian school reflex, but it wasn't all that long ago.  It's been a long time since I turned in a homework assignment, but for many years after completing my classroom education I would get that migratory urge every August.  I miss that feeling.

My oldest son Jack started tenth grade on August 11, an absurdly early start to the school year if you ask me. As I understand it, the original purpose of summer vacation in our then-agrarian society was so that the children could help get the crops either into or out of the ground.  Since marijuana is Kentucky's #1 cash crop these days, it's probably better to hustle the kids back to school early than have them working the fields.  Even though he didn't get out of school until June 3, he confessed to me in early August that he was ready to go back and see his friends.  He was bored. At age 15, Jack is stuck in that awkward place between childhood and manhood.  He wants to go out, but he can't drive.  He likes girls, but his rap needs work. He wants to be cool, but his body is in the throes of the metamorphosis, making coolness a difficult proposition.

Jack's boredom was hard for me to comprehend, but then again I was viewing summer vacation through the lens of my own experience, not his.  I grew up in a different era and in a different place.  In my childhood I was fortunate enough to have the Atlantic Ocean in my backyard.  If there was nothing else to do, well I always had bodysurfing as a fallback option.  I also grew up in an era of far less parental oversight.  How else to explain that one of my favored childhood activities was riding my bike (along with all of the other neighborhood children) behind the Mosquito Man as he drove his yellow truck through the neighborhood pumping out massive aerosol plumes of mosquito poison?  He would try frantically to wave us off but that just encouraged us to peddle faster to see who could get closest to the nozzle and inhale the greatest quantities of what probably was pure DDT.

 That my children have no obvious physical deformities and that I am still alive is inexplicable to me.  Where were the parents, you ask?  Well, this was the 1970s, so I would imagine that they were smoking and drinking and carrying on, happy that we were anywhere but underfoot.  It is precisely because of this lack of oversight and the acknowledgement of our demented behavior that as parents we now have our own children on lockdown.

When I was a child and wanted to ride my bike, I told my mom I was going out, looked both ways, and was gone.  No bike helmet, no cell phone, and no pre-arranged check-in at my destination because more often than not I didn't have a destination.   I can't ever recall a single instance of my mother being frantically worried about where I was.  I was born in Petersburg, Virginia and lived there until I was seven. I vividly remember at age six being miles away from home on my bike, playing in old Civil War forts or digging clay in creeks that were filled with water moccasins and copperheads. I was six years old, for cryin' out loud! Nowadays, when Jack wants to ride his bike around the neighborhood, he has to wear a helmet, provide us an itinerary, and power up his locator beacon. Sadly, this is a reflection of the times we live in.  Were Shannon and I as unconcerned about Jack's whereabouts as my own parents were about mine, we would be jailed as unfit parents.  Imagine the consequences if, as the result of our nonchalance, Jack was scooped up by some guy in a van and turned into a skin shirt. The world is too dangerous to let our kids do what we did.  No wonder Jack was bored and ready to go back to school-he can't do anything because as parents we are too scared of the world our children are growing up in to let them have the independence that we took for granted.

So, school is both Jack's place of learning and also the nexus of his social universe.  When, after all my schooling was done and I would have the "back-to-school" reflex that I described earlier, it was not, I'm sorry to say, the schoolwork that I pined for.  No, what I missed was the chance to immerse myself in the giant pool of similarly-aged kids, kids with the same anxieties and fears, the same curiosity about life, kids on the same life trajectory. Like these guys.

"Mr. Blutarsky.  Zero point zero."

Like many things in life it is only with the benefit of hindsight that I now appreciate school for what it was and what it offered me.  So, as the summer of 2010 winds down and a new school year rolls around, I remember those feelings that accompanied the beginning of each new school year.  And while those feelings don't come automatically to me anymore, I recall them with a certain wistfulness.  With each passing year I agree more and more with George Bernard Shaw, who famously said that "youth is wasted on the young."  What I wouldn't give these days for a crappy school lunch and a history test.