No-bummer summers

What a difference time makes. Twenty years ago, I hated school with a murderous passion, a byproduct of the manufactured pathos only a middle schooler can muster. Now school kids make me jealous. If it wasn’t illegal, insane, and morally reprehensible, I’d find an eight grader and karate chop him in the kidneys.

 

But that’s just because I’m petty. See, with school winding down, the sidewalks will soon be choked with kids riding skateboards and bicycles. Girls will spend half the day jumping rope in their driveways, while the boys who pretend not to like them waste whole afternoons in front of game consoles, chugging Diet Mountain Dew and playing Grand Theft Auto online with Indonesian car salesmen. They’ll be awash in a seemingly endless expanse of freedom, with no responsibility, no obligations, and possibly no clean underwear.

 

It’s summer vacation, and I want it.

 

Who doesn’t, really? Think about how amazing it would be to just up and leave work for two-and-a-half months, with nothing to do between now and September but dig beach sand out of your toenails and read badly-written books about teenage vampires. Then, when you come back in the fall, you and your co-workers can exchange notes on how much everyone has changed, and blow off the first week kicking around Hacky Sacks and making out in stairwells.

 

Or maybe kids don’t do those things anymore. They probably have making-out apps for their phones or something.

 

Regardless, it would be a pleasurably disorienting experience reverting back to those old patterns. The thing about time is that it’s relative; the older you get, the more days you’ve got under your belt, and the more quickly each successive one passes – until, by the end of your life, a single day seems to take about as long as the local sports roundup on the evening news, albeit with decidedly less emphasis on high school field hockey. Time is a funnel, its sands accelerating as it reaches bottom, and so the depressing thing about adulthood  – aside from everything – is that once we realize how fleeting it is, it’s too late. We’re caught up in work and bills and planning and saving and re-doing the tile in our kitchens, and we forget to grasp at small moments and hold on to them, squeeze out of them everything we can before they flutter away on the breeze like tulip petals. Plus we start wearing plaid socks. Tacky.

 

A child, meanwhile, is new to the game. They’ve got a shorter frame of reference. Give them a single day – no school, no sports, just a stick and some dirt and a lazy afternoon – and it’s a vast expanse, a slow-trickling infinity. The phrase “summer vacation” lights up a kid’s brain so much because they know, intuitively, what it means: A never-ending succession of such days. An expanding universe of formless, shapeless time. It’s a great opportunity to get the really important things done, like drenching friends with Super Soakers, and reading comic books in the hollows between tree branches. Not to mention breaking things with baseballs, which is usually followed by interminable days grounded in your room, your only company the California Raisins doll you got for being a good boy when you were four.

 

That’s totally a non-specific example. Cough.

 

Yet few of us realize what we’ve got until it’s gone. Irish playwright and ZZ Top impersonator George Bernard Shaw once said, “Youth is wasted on the young,” and boy, was he drinking his insight juice. Only now, with our joint pain and exfoliating moisturizers, do we recognize the fleeting preciousness of those structureless summers. If every toddler was given a 50-hour-a-week desk job for a year – something banal, with lots of file-moving and pencil-sharpening – maybe we’d appreciate those aimless mornings flinging boogers at stray cats.

 

I’m reminded of sixth grade, and not just ’cause of the booger thing. I was part of a program called SPARK, a “gifted and talented” program geared toward children who are expected to achieve great things in life, like writing columns about cereal and toll booths. As the school year wound to a close, all the SPARK students from Lewiston’s various elementary schools gathered in a central location for a big pre-summer brain-off, a series of debates over the course of three days. For the first two days, the debates were one-on-one, with a third child acting as judge; but on the final day, two teams of four squared off against one another. I was a judge on that last day. The topic: Summer vacation. One team was to argue for it, the other against it. 

 

My strategy as judge was to chew on tufts of grass and merely pretend to listen, but some of the debate must have seeped through, because to this day I remember that the anti-vacation group had a remarkably mature and well-reasoned argument. The super fine details have been obfuscated by thousands of days and about 150 vodka martinis, but the basic gist was that productivity would be higher, students would learn more, and there wouldn’t be that inevitable summer IQ drop, what with kids putting aside their books in favor of Nerf balls and remote-controlled cars. All of this is true.

 

The pro-vacation group’s argument went something like this: “It’s summer vacation! Come on!”

 

This is also true.

 

The American educational system gets a lot of flak for being super crappy, mostly because it’s super crappy. It’s been suggested that abolishing such a large vacation would help, and you know, it very well might. But children would lose something valuable, whether they truly appreciate that time or not. Decades removed from the SPARK debate, it’s not cosines and quadratic equations and the boiling point of mercury that stoke my wistful recollections; it’s the 2 o’clock breezes on cool summer days, The Amazing Spider-Man clutched in one hand, a Moxie float in the other. All that time. It’s silly and unrealistic to fantasize about a similar break occurring in typical adult life, but if it wasn’t for silly and unrealistic fantasies, we’d all go nuts and start punching department store mannequins in their stupid faces. Every beach trip or summer hike is a throwback to an earlier period, when for all intents and purposes, that’s all life was.

 

Of course, we adults get to quaff Seabreezes and watch movies with boobs in them. So it’s not like we’ve got it all bad.