“There,” said the teenage boy grimly, making an X on a piece of paper pinned to his bedroom door. “Only eight more.” “Eight more what?” asked a younger child.
“Days. Of. School.” He brought out the words with the soul-weariness of a convict serving a life sentence.
“That doesn’t make sense,” said the younger child. “We have at least three more weeks.”
The inmate explained that when you subtracted a school camping trip, a couple of half-days and various other bits and pieces it came down to just over a week left in the pen.
“After that I can sleep late and do whatever I want,” said the boy.
You would have thought the prospect would bring buoyancy to his tone, but we are in the strange doldrums of late spring, and everything is a bit off.
It’s a funny time, this: a season of restlessness and listlessness between the end of school and the beginning of summer. The warm weather and late sunsets make people want to stay up late, yet the alarm still goes off as usual. Everyone is aching to be done with the school year, to move on to summertime – there’s June, coming up on the calendar, so close! – but the grind goes on.
With the end of school so close (if not close enough for certain adolescent convicts), it’s too late to fix grades that ought to have been tweaked earlier in the year — but not to late to foul them up. It’s too late to bother getting new trousers for boys whose ankles are showing. It’s too late to bother lowering the hems on girls’ skirts. And no, say a thousand mothers, I am not buying you a new pair of school shoes at this point in the year, even if your old ones are too tight. (“Why, when I was a girl. …”)
Like tectonic plates, the great schedules of the ambitious young come into conflict at this time of year. Young dancers and sprinters and tennis players and rowers are all practicing like mad in the hopes of triumphing in their end-of-year performances and competitions and regattas and matches. Yet, it’s already time for many of them to start slipping into the chill waters of area pools in preparation for summer swim and dive meets.
The American academic year isn’t long, of course, by international standards. If our schools finished in July the way they do in the United Kingdom, no doubt we’d all be snug and contented now. It would not occur to us to yearn yet for the final bell. But it is human nature to adapt to experience and expectation, and right about now the school year feels plenty long enough.
Some time later, the boy, who had been quiet and pensive, suddenly said, “Seven.”
“I thought you said eight,” said his kid sister.
He smiled. “Counting from tomorrow, I mean,” he said.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
