Light in August

Late August has its own unique character—the end of summer, wilting with melancholy, languid with hot summer evenings, child-joy being subtly eroded by shadow’s undertow, sundialing toward lockers and school clocks.

Being neither a kid nor a teacher, I don’t really get a summer vacation and this takes the edge off of late summer’s mournful meander.  I watch from the riparian netherworld—not so sad as the child I once was dreading that first day of school, mostly for being so far from that last day of school, but nevertheless still moved by the river of life, my boys’ lugubrious lament and their sweet regression to long-forgotten games where they left little bits of childhood parked in corners, closets and card-packs.

Full-on parents feel the secret relief of school and the opening of a slice of days while still savoring August the way we intensify our last licks of the ice-cream cone dwindling to that tiny morsel of softened crunch, and then it’s gone.

These dog days seem like no time for pondering issues beyond the dragonflies and the crickets.  The smell of water on hot concrete.  A sky that makes you naively marvel at a blue no human could have invented, a blue so perfect, and so perfectly placed.  Clouds forming off the pacific that will twirl and shape-shift over the Rockies and across the plains, thundering, gathering, cumulating and wisp-ing to the east-coast willows, rumbling over the Hudson to bring those booming late summer explosions, the air blue and exciting.

And on sudden it’s cool.  Leaves rustle ominously.  Collective sighs rise and rain back down again.

I dreamed of being my age but starting on the first day of an unfamiliar high school—and while actual high school was a nightmare, at least at the start, in my dream it was not so bad.  Being back in school is a classic dream and I always think of it as the deep Self clueing us that some sort of new learning is in order.  I’ve been missing old friends in far away places and maybe that is the positive side of school as a dream symbol, as in my dream the “kids” (some of whom seemed also to be my age, although unfamiliar to me) were rather nice.

While now school might be fun, it was quite confusing to me as a kid—I mean the whole gestalt of why I was even there.  Why is it that no one explains to us, as children, the simple reasons why we might benefit from the curriculum to which we submit or rebel, but rarely embrace and ingest.  Some strive to conquest and others cringe into the Eeyore state that is school for them, but few have any sort of map about why algebra leads to geometry or why history matters to their own future; perhaps the real reason that school very often feels like a burden is that it is endlessly about getting ready for the next thing, and never being truly present to the diem one is told to carpe… rather it is all about the dime one is supposed to chase, all the while it being whispered that you can’t buy much with a dime.

So, what’s my point?  Simply that the end of summer feels a certain lovely wistful heartbreaking way and while it’s a little different for each of us, the same sky domes us all.  I used to lie on the grass and stare up at the giant cottonwood in my neighbor’s yard, endlessly watching the little parachute seeds paratrooping through the cicada-screaming air.  I remember the freeze of the air-conditioning contrasting with the summer sun on my fearless skin, days before an open door to the yard made me think of the utility bill.

So, as our collective kids face the Sisyphus march to learning all about what they’re never really sure why, hunched below their towering book bags… in an era where books are altogether drawing toward their cover-bound, tree-shredding close, perhaps we can dedicate a morsel of our been-there-done-that well-seasoned hearts to compassion for the age-old doleful feeling that, mingled with the excitement of back-to-school clothes and and new notebooks and seeing old friends and making new friends, coldly tickles the little hearts of our brave good kids as they march forward into a world none of us really understand nor whose future can we envision.  What we can do is love, loving even that which we cannot understand or explain, that which enshrouds like a veil and breathes like curtains in the soft swelling afternoon of what may be fast-fading freedom or looming new friendships.

Namaste, Bruce