This time snap also affects the sleep schedule of our kids.  For the last several weeks they have kept a strict regimen that involved staying up until commercials for Johnny Carson DVD’s are on TV, and not waking until after the lunch whistle blew.  After that they lolled around like animals in the zoo on a hot day who can’t even raise their heads to get their picture taken by Canadian tourists.

Our kids have forgotten everything they learned in school last year, but luckily they have been graduated to a new grade so their teachers won’t realize that fact until it’s time for Parent/Teacher Lie Day.

In spite of its regal place on the calendar, no one in our family remembered that Labor Day, (of which today is one) is the day before the kids return to school.  No one except my wife who prepared by purchasing one million dollars worth of groceries with which to make nutritional sack lunches for our children to take to school each day.  Our children participated by eating everything yesterday.

Ordinarily I am warned of the imminent end of summer by the arrival of advertisements featuring mildly sedated children pretending to enjoy wearing their trendy back-to-school clothing that we cannot afford to buy our children which is why they are not as hysterically happy as the airbrushed Generation Huh? in the glossy pages.  But somehow I missed these harbingers of fall. 

We have purchased new off brand blue jeans at our local mega-grocery store.  They are ‘Alevi’s’, but no one will know they are a generic jean unless they notice that one pantleg is 2 inches shorter than the other.  We got them free with the purchase of a large bottle of pain reliever.

I did see the Parental Letter from the Principal, a comically optimistic note outlining new policies and procedures along with a glowing prediction for a successful school year, which, in my view, could only be jeopardized by the actual appearance of students.  This letter gives the date and time that school will start, which if you subtract one day, you get Labor Day.  Which is how I knew what today was.

Sometime in the next 24 hours, probably 21 hours from now, we will scramble frantically around the house looking for backpacks and school supplies and permission slips and schedules, and then after a brief argument about who rides ‘shotgun’ get in the traffic jam that will make us late for the first day of school.  It’s an annual tradition.

It’s been 36 Labor Days since my last back to school experience and it still pierces my summer skin.  The thought of going into Algebra class with sand still in my shoes give me a clammy feeling usually reserved for eating at Red Lobster. 

The memory of watching the last days of summer through the bunker windows of Chemistry class is still fresh.  The image of shafts of sunlight sneaking into gym class spotlighting the dust stirred up by awkward calisthenics.  The sound of lockers slamming on books we forgot we needed to take home.   The prisoner shuffle between classes at each bell ring. 

Summer is slipping away, but we have a little time to breathe in the last of it, to get grass stained knees and ice cream stained shirts and sun stained skin.  We can’t hide in a Chilean mine, but we can grab this day and hold on tight, so that we don’t get pulled into the wisdom and linoleum lined halls a minute before we have to.

Hope this finds you soaking it in,        

David

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