all the summer world
was bright fresh – brimming with life
music at the lips
Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air.
From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (Hartford, Conn: American Publishing Co., 1884).
I am keeper of the calendar where I work and we keep the next three months of those big desk calendar pages pinned to the wall with significant dates marked up.
I took down June today (as the last week of June is also on the July page) and put up September.
I outlined the important dates of Labor Day, 1st day of NCAA football and 1st day of NFL season and marked the ‘end’ of the summer season here on the Island where I work.
I thought about and thought that something was missing and I noticed I had not included the back to school dates for the area.
This is important for us as it marks the end of the family vacation cycle for the summer.
I looked up the dates for the South Carolina county where we are and the neighboring Georgia County.
Beaufort County, South Carolina starts school … on August 7th.
On a Friday!
Chatham County, Georgia starts school on Monday, August 3rd.
I do not want to get into the school year and extended fall breaks discussion or how if you want to have weeks of High School Football playoffs and still end your football season on Thanksgiving weekend you need to start school earlier and end earlier.
I want to talk about my summer as a kid at Crestview Elementary school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up.
We would get out early in June.
Looking at a calendar for June, 1967, when I was in 2nd grade, most likely we got on around June 15th or 16th.
I do remember that Memorial Day was, 1) a day off from school and, 2) a day off anywhere in the week as it was May 30th and if it happened to fall on a Saturday or Sunday, that was too bad.
After Memorial day, there would be another 2 weeks of school in hot rooms with no one able to concentrate on any type of school work.
It was during these two weeks that at some point I would put on my most saddest, mournful face and walk up to the teacher’s desk and ask about final report cards.
I would say, “Guess I’ll be seeing you next year,” and shuffle away.
Somehow I was always passed to the next grade.
The only thing that happened in that last two weeks was field day.
To us kids, field day was the Super Bowl, World Series and Olympics all rolled into one and I thought it was the only one held anywhere in the world.
It wasn’t until years later that I was reading a book about WW2 POW camps in Germany where British soldiers would organize a yearly field day in the spring.
About the same time I also came across lots of references of any number of books and short stories that took place at boarding schools and colleges where field day was a fixture in the schedule.
It had all the great events like standing broad jump, vertical high jump, soft ball throw and running.
And here’s the thing.
Everyone was in it.
No one was left out.
And …
AND … at the end of the day, little medals would be handed out to the winners.
THERE WERE NO PARTICPATION AWARDS!
It was do or die on your own except for the last event which was a relay race between mixed gender teams selected from each grade, 1st thru 6th.
It wasn’t a 100 yard dash or even a 60 yard dash but a dash for as long as lanes could be laid out in the big field behind the school.
As I remember it, someone from the City parks and recs would show up and a race track was laid out with white chalk lines.
The only competition in this relay race was if the 5th grade might pull off the upset and win over the 6th but otherwise those big 6th graders always won.
I always approached field day with enthusiasm and and a level excitement.
I could imagine winning a ribbon or two or, maybe … all of them.
There is an episode of The Andy Griffith Show were little Opie day dreams about winning so many ribbons at field day, they have to turn him around to pin more on his back.
Boy! Howdy! but could I relate to Opie.
Then Field Day would come and it always seemed to be a hot day.
Our playground field was grass but a grass of a kind that didn’t grow anywhere else in my world.
It was sparse and wide blades and prickly and when you ran on it, more dirt and dust came up out of the ground in a way that didn’t happen on any other grass anywhere else that I knew of.
The dirt had a sweet sickly smell to it.
On a hot day with hundreds of kids running around, a cloud of gray hovered about six inches off the ground and your shoes and socks turned an odd dirty gray.
I also remember that in that day and age, no shorts were allowed so we were all wearing long, hot slacks as blue jeans weren’t allowed yet either.
It was hot and stuffy and smelly.
From enthusiastic anticipation I became more and more anxious.
Thinking first what am I doing here to thinking HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE.
The events would start and I would take my turn and though I might jump kind of high or through my softball kind of far there was always a Don Gagnon or Ross Dornon who jumped higher or throw farther.
It wasn’t humiliation because so many other kids where at my level but every once in a while someone like Donny Gray would go nuts and unleash some super jump or record softball throw and take home a medal.
It didn’t take long for the magic and excitement of field day to wear off and all I wanted was for it to be over.
The relay race would be run and we would all be herded into the gym for the Awards Ceremony but we all had a chance to line up at the drinking fountain from the sink in our classrooms.
The lower EL classrooms also had a small restroom and after looking at the long line at the sink, I went into the restroom and cupped my hands under the sink in there to get a drink.
Which I thought was pretty smart and biblical (thinking of Gideon and his 400 men who drank water from the stream with a cupped hand) and I did this for years until someone caught me and yelled “Mike’s drinking bathroom water!”
Off to the gym to here the names yelled out for kids to come up and get their ribbons.
I could have listed them before we started.
They all would have been those big kids in school.
When you were a little kid, you knew who the big kids were and you knew the law of the jungle.
This was their day.
At least my name wasn’t Opie.
But my day was coming, that last day and when that last day came, it was usually a half day.
Our desks would be empty.
The blackboards were clean.
Because it was spring the windows would be open and the rooms smelled better then they did the rest of the year.
Our gym shoes that hung from our desk seats would have been brought home which also might have contributed to the cleaner smell.
There was nothing we had to do, that final bell would ring and summer would start.
We knew we had the rest of the month of June.
And we had the entire month of July.
And we had the entire month of August.
And somewhere in the far far future, away in September, after some holiday called Labor Day, we would have to be back in school.
But until then, there was NOTHING we had to do.
It was summer break and it seemed like we were off the entire summer and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life.
There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips.
There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step.
The locust-trees were in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air.
Freedom.
A freedom you don’t get to experience too often.
I looked at those school schedules today and I thought August 3rd? August 7th?
Those poor kids.
A modern view of our playing field. The playground and basketball courts are new and we didn’t have soccer nets in those days.
The run down ball diamond is gone.
But that grass and the dirt is still there and I can smell and feel the heat and drama of field day.
