It was like a jail break, wasn’t it? A feeling of euphoria. Total freedom. As if the floodgates had opened and set you — this raging torrent of water — upon the world. Nothing could hold you in. It was total liberation.
And chaos!
As the bell rang on the last day of school, kids raced from the classrooms. There was great yelling and shouting. Books flew in every direction. Shoes, too. Shoes! Why did shoes always sail through the air in the scrum and hootenanny of that final release? Who knows.
If you had a pulled a fire alarm you wouldn’t have gotten such a flurry. But now, kids ran in every direction. Not even stopping at their cars. (“Johnny, where are you going?” parents yelled.) Just running wild and free with delirious smiles on their faces. Seven miles out they would finally stop, look around and think, “Mom? Um … where am I?”
I’ll tell you where, little Johnny: You’re in summer!!! And there isn’t much in the world better than that. (Well, unless you’re lost in an industrial area on the south side of town, but the cops will locate you soon enough.)
I was thinking about all of this one night earlier this week as our family sat at the dinner table.
“Thursday is the last day, huh?” I asked my daughter, who was closing out sixth grade. “Aren’t you going to run out screaming and jumping over cars and launching fireworks?”
“Meh,” she said.
“Say WHAT?!?” I replied. “You’re not going to light fires and scream until your vocal chords need surgery and then charge the riot police when they finally get there to try and restore order?”
I went to Catholic school in Tampa. It was kind of like prison, only in prison the uniforms were better, and there was less barbed wire. When we got out it was like Mardi Gras, Christmas and a plane crash all rolled into one. Total chaos. An excitement unrivaled by pretty much anything I had ever experienced. A rush of emotions and cheering and for some reason, great clouds of dust. Plus, those shoes!
Maybe I’m recalling it wrong, but I seem to remember nuns shouting, “We will turn the fire hoses on if you don’t calm down!”
“Bring it!” we screamed back, knowing the threat of detention held no more weight.
As we drove home, I thought about all the things I planned to do that summer … it pretty much revolved around watching TV until I could feel my brain cells starting to melt.
But as I reminisced about this, I saw a sadness come across my daughter’s face. Summer never was all it was cracked up to be. There was nothing ever on TV. Friends weren’t around all day, whenever you wanted. Household chores couldn’t compete with someone threatening to spray you down with a fire hose. (At least for me.) “Total freedom” never quite lived up to the hype. The further you got from the last day, the more you thought about the first day back. The days in detention. The lunches with friends. And next year’s euphoric, shoe-flying final day of school.