Through a Glass, Darkly

I happened to read the other day that the public schools here were starting fall classes this week, and in fact, they began on Wednesday. It seems to me that the date of school opening has inched much closer to the beginning of August than it was when I was a student. It's not that I have any stake in it, but it goes against my grain to think of going back to school while summer is still in full flower. It seems a little cruel and unusual, but don't tell any school administrators I said so. It's just my personal opinion, which means little.

I tend to think that school should start, at the earliest, at the very end of August, or better yet, right after Labor Day. The Christmas holiday should be two weeks long, and there should be a full week of spring break or Easter recess, whichever you prefer to call it. Summer vacation should be three months long, and it should begin either right before Memorial Day or immediately after. Of course, my first elementary school experience was in Florida, where snow days never wreaked havoc with the school calendar, and a schedule like this was actually possible.

As much as I liked summer vacations as a child, I was usually a bit excited about going back to school in those early years. There would be new clothes, a new lunch box, and that wonderful smell of new composition books, pencils, and ink cartridges. When I was in school, I didn't mind it most of the time and sometimes quite enjoyed being there. It's just that vacations and the freedom that came with them were so much more fun, and sitting in a classroom all day is difficult even for a good student. In many ways, it was a more innocent time, though I know it's a truism to say so.

I reminded myself when out and about this week to be on the lookout for school buses and have, indeed, seen several. Yes, everything seems a bit muddled when school buses appear only a week and a half into August, but as muddled as the state of the world is generally, an anomaly like this is only a drop in the bucket. I pulled into the parking lot of a local Catholic Church the other day, purely on impulse, because I wondered if it might be open (it has wonderful light, which is great for meditation). In the parking lot was an expensive-looking SUV with dark tinted windows and the engine running, a slightly ominous sight that I'm pretty sure would have given me pause even as a child.

I went to Catholic schools where the church was next door to the school building and seemed a fairly benign place, even if you didn't exactly believe everything they told you. Church was a place where they had bingo and spaghetti dinners, not weird-looking SUVs that kept their windows rolled up and engines running for fifteen minutes at a time. I considered whether this was any of my business or not, as all kinds of strange things seem to happen these days without anyone taking notice, but in the end I decided to report it to the church. The woman I talked to seemed to take it in stride, though she did say they had noticed an uptick in the number of people pulling into their lot to check their cell phones.

OK, well, I'm old-fashioned, I believe in no school till Labor Day, watching out for school buses, and reporting suspicious activity--so I did my part. I hope someone would think it a little stranger if this happened in a school parking lot with kids around, but it does seem to take a lot to get people's attention these days, so I don't really know. I guess the truth is that I just don't like tinted windows.