Back to School

Lileks writes about this time of year:

There’s always something about summer that increased the need to find a Special Friend, as though it would all be ruined if you passed the season without a humid interlude. But then you’d pin your hopes on fall: the time of fresh starts. (See also, spring, and summer.) You’d meet someone in class. Then you remembered you weren’t in school anymore.

You never shake that back-to-school feeling. Even the years between school and kids of your own, the turning of the leaves brings back the sense of industriousness and new situations. For most adults the emotion dims and dulls, as they all do, but sometimes you catch it full and bright.

I still do, every year.

It must be a chemical thing; once the sun gets below a certain point in the southern sky, I go to Cub and buy a tin of Nestle Quik. Why? Because every single first day of school when I was a child, I came home to a cup of Quik. And while I'm not big on tradition (see: my christmas ornament boxes), I do carry this one forward, and if I'm around my grandkids, I'll make sure my kids do the same. I have forgotten most of my first days of school - who I saw, what I brought with me, who I sat with - but I remember some of those glasses of Quik as clearly as if I were doing them now.

Even more powerful, though, is when the first snap of cool air floats in from the northwest, about the time it starts to visibly dim at nine. A little voice in the back of my head still wakes up and tells me "Time to pack up and move back to Watson Hall", my old dorm at Jamestown College. The old, tumbledown, mouse-ridden dorm was my home for three school years; in a school with no Greek system (we used frat boys for firewood), living in the musty, decrepit, isolated Watson was the closest thing to a fraternity the college offered. I genuinely looked forward to going back there every year...

...and 22 years after the last move, when I feel that first cool breeze and stare into the early dusk and start seeing all the kids moving in to Hamline University, up the street, I still do.

Posted by Mitch at August 16, 2006 12:05 PM | TrackBack