“What? That is totally not fair!” yelped the almost-eight-year-old.
“Yes it is,” her nine-year-old sister said encouragingly, “It means we still have half the summer left–”
“No, it means it’s half over, and we haven’t even done anything!”
“But we have, we’ve been to the beach, and we’ve gone to Maine, and we get to swim at the pool and eat ice cream and–”
‘Well, I’m calling a taxi and I’m going to tell it to take me to the airport and I’m going somewhere like Williamsburg or Italy or China because I do not want summer to be half over and that’s final.”
That little exchange, which was accompanied by furious Gallic gestures of incredulity by the glass-half-empty party, came after a nearby adult observed that this week marks the middle of summer.
Yes, indeed: Check your calendar. We’re just about at the halfway point between the end of the last school year and the return, in September, to the academic grind of a new one.
We’re only weeks away from remembering that we’d better get to the shoe store before everyone else brings their children in; weeks away from buying fresh notebooks and compasses and erasers and backpacks and lunch boxes and all the other equipment of the modern schoolchild. Parents whose children are enrolled in private or parochial schools are, about now, making the first installments on next year’s tuition.
Adult responsibilities and adult sensibilities have a horrible way of impinging on the romantic idea of summer as an effortless time of swishing linens and gurgling surf – a romantic idea that for children is (minus the linen), reality.
For children, summer is a warm eternity spritzed with charcoal and sunscreen; with a soundtrack provided by birdsong, lawnmowers, and the DVDs they invariably persuade tired adults to let them watch at night. Lucky things.
Summer somehow underscores the poignant fact that children and grown-ups occupy time in completely different ways. We adults divvy time up, with a day (or a year) constituting a kind of pie out of which we jealously remove slices in the painful consciousness that what we have left is dwindling fast.
Children don’t even know there is a pie. The younger they are, the less aware they are that day follows night, that lunch follows breakfast, that arriving at a swimming pool means that at some point you really will have to leave it.
They do not even hear the clock that sometimes deafens grown-ups with its relentlessness ticking. Unless their stomachs are growling, children usually don’t think about time at all, which is why when their fathers have shouted up the stairs on school mornings that they’ve got to come down for breakfast, now, or we’ll all be late, their mothers go up to find some of them playing dolls, one with his head plunged under a pillow, another wandering about half-dressed and one – one! – pressed and combed and ready to go.
This Edenic obliviousness to the rush of time is exacerbated in summer by the languor of the warm air and, for many families, the suspension of the usual frantic enrichment schedule.
Unless they’re in camp, children wake up when they’re finished sleeping, and drift down to breakfast when they’re hungry. We may chivvy them to practice their instrument, or to hurry for a swim lesson, or to do a bit of their school-assigned summer reading, but it’s hard to muster much urgency – at this point in the summer.
A friend of mine recently heard from a nephew who graduated from university this spring. Rather suddenly, the fellow has started to hear a strange ticking sound. This has coincided with accepting his first job, which starts in a week.
“I still find it awfully difficult to believe that I will no longer have winter breaks, spring breaks, etc,” the stricken youth wrote to his aunt, “I suppose the ‘real’ world begins now, huh? Excited about the having-a-job aspect of it, but somewhat uneasy about the idea of living the 9-5 lifeÉ”
Welcome to our world, kid — and enjoy what’s left of the summer.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
