No School

As September turns to October and summer slips away, something just doesn’t feel right. The baseball season is winding down, football season has kicked off, and hockey training camps and preseason games are underway. The leaves are starting to change colors, the days are getting shorter and there’s no need for an air conditioner anymore. Then I see one of those silly commercials about who is happier about going back to school, the parents or the kids, and I know what’s making feel out of sort. School is back in session, but not in my house.

For the first time in about seventeen years, I don’t have a child in a public school. That feels very strange, almost disorienting, because from September to June, the schedule always revolved around the kids and their schedule. My wife and I worked our appointments, errands, and dates around the kids’ schedules that were defined mostly by school. We had to pick them up from their after school activities, run to the store to get supplies for a project (usually the day before it was due and ten minutes before the store closed), and make sure we didn’t stay out past 9:00 on a weeknight during school. We don’t have to do that anymore.

I saw the few young neighborhood kids waiting for the bus the first day of school. They were excited, they were smiling, and they were happy, probably looking forward to learning a whole lot of stuff and meeting new kids. I loved it, because whether it was their first year of their third, they still liked school. Their optimism and joy hadn’t been snuffed out yet. If only they could stay that way forever.

I thought back to my first day of school and how excited I was to be going. I was moving up to the “big” kid level, going to the place my older brothers and sisters had gone. I didn’t go to kindergarten, so Elementary school was a big step for me. We lived close enough to the school that we didn’t take the bus; we were Walkers, as they called the kids who didn’t take the bus. I don’t really remember if Mom walked us to school on the first day, or if she drove us, but I do remember that first day.

Mom was holding my hand as she walked me to the classroom. I was nervous, excited, and a little scared because the school was a lot bigger than I thought. As a matter of fact, I liked the look of it from the outside better than the inside. When we got to the classroom, I suddenly realized I was going to be here at school all day, with all these strange people, WITHOUT MOM! Now I was really scared. I decided that, no thank you, I don’t want to be here and refused to go in to the room. I started crying, probably thinking that would get me off the hook, but Mom and this “Miss Zona” lady were doing their best to calm me down and get me into that room.

Unfortunately for them, nothing was working. That is until I heard the sweetest words ever. “At snack time you can have milk and peanut butter cookies,” Miss Zona said. Wait. What? Peanut butter cookies if I go into the room and stay for a while? And some milk to go with it? I let go of Mom’s hand, turned off the water works, and gave her the brush off. Why hadn’t they told me this earlier? We could have avoided the little misunderstanding at the door. I went into the classroom, looking forward to snack time, figuring I could hold out until then. The amazing part of all this was that I actually enjoyed the whole day, not just snack time, and Miss Zona turned out to be an awesome teacher, having just the right balance of motherly kindness and teacherly sternness.

I’m still getting used to not being involved with school, teachers, homework, projects, plays, and chorus. I don’t have to make sure the kids are getting enough sleep and eating something before rushing off to school. It’s wonderful in many ways, but there’s one thing that’s nagging me: What am I going to do with all this extra time?

Fall and Football

Ah, Fall. The days are warm, the nights are cool and everyone in the family is back to a normal schedule (that means I’m not the only who isn’t on vacation). I really do love this time of year, when you can go outside in the middle of the day and do stuff and not be sweating profusely. The sky is a deep blue color and the leaves are starting to turn colors, too. You go out at night and someone in the neighborhood is burning some wood. I just love that smell. Somewhere from the back of my mind, happy thoughts and memories come forth. And then there’s football.

Yes, football season is in full swing, already four games into the season. There is just something relaxing about watching a game or two on Sunday afternoon, hanging out with family and friends, and eating some good food. I’d love for the Patriots to win all their games, but does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? If I’m watching the game all by myself and my team wins, it’s not as much fun as watching the game when my team loses if I’m with a bunch of people. Unless I have something important to do, I’m watching at least one game every Sunday.

I didn’t play organized football as a kid. We had plenty of games, either playing two-hand touch in the street, or playing tackle football in our back yard or in the field at the cemetery. We also played another kind of football. There was no running, no passing and no tackling. We didn’t even go outside to play it. No, this kind of football was played indoors, on a table or a desk, with paper. That’s right, paper. You took a piece of paper and folded it into a small triangle and pushed the “football” toward the other guy’s end of the table. If it hung over the end without falling off, you had a touchdown. You kicked extra points by having the other guy lean on his elbows and make a “U” shape with his two hands, thumbs touching and pointer fingers extended up for goal posts. You had to kick it through the uprights for it to be good.

I guess the real name of the game is paper football, but we just called it table football. In elementary school, we played at recess on a table at the back of the room when we couldn’t go outside due to bad weather. When the bell rang for the end of recess the game was over. One year we decided to make the football out of construction paper instead of regular white-lined paper. That little paper football left a mark! In middle school, we played at lunch on a table in the corner of the cafeteria. If too many people (girls) complained about getting hit in the back of the head by a football, that was the end of that game, so we tried to get a table in the corner away from everybody else. We even played a little in high school at lunch or in study hall. Study hall was a time when you didn’t have a class scheduled and you were supposed to, well, study. However, not many people studied in study hall. We felt like we were getting a little too old for paper football, so it kind of died out after freshman year.

We used to play at home, too. We had a perfect sized coffee table in the living room that was just made for paper football. It was smooth wood on top, no ridges, no tiles, no nothing, just wood. I think one of my brothers might have made it in woodshop in school. I liked playing against my older brothers because size didn’t matter, I could actually beat them in spite of how much smaller I was. Of course, most of the time they beat me anyway, but it was still fun to play. It was awesome to drill them in the face with that little paper football when kicking extra points. I was pretty accurate with those. We’d play, laugh, have fun and usually end up fighting about something. Then we’d pull ourselves together and finish the game before Mom shut the whole thing down. No, it was better to overlook our differences of opinion on whether it was a touchdown or not than to have to do a couch faceoff, even if it only lasted a few minutes. It killed the flow of the game.

We had a lot of fun playing paper football when we were kids. It was quick, easy, there weren’t a lot of rules, and no one got hurt. You didn’t need to have a deep blue sky and warm sun to play, but there’s just something about a crisp, sunny, Fall afternoon in New England that just begs you to go outside and enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the season.  

In the Blink of an Eye

It’s hard to believe that Labor Day has come and gone once again. Summer is over, at least unofficially. It seems that this year was really dragging, feeling like it was almost standing still, and then suddenly it whipped forward in a blur of activity. The months of January through June were so slow it felt like there were 40 days in each month. May and June were especially slow. They were like those cartoon dreams where you’re trying to run away from something and you realize you have cement blocks on your feet and you’re running in molasses. It seemed like the 4^th of July, and my vacation time, were somehow not getting any closer.

Finally, June turned to July. I took my usual vacation during the week of July 4^th and felt like summer was mercifully here. I relaxed, went down to the Vineyard and enjoyed some time with my wife. Then I made a huge mistake. I blinked and it was the end of August. That’s all it took, a quick blink of the eyes and 8 weeks were gone. Scientists say that time is constant, that there’s 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week. I either just proved them wrong or I’m living in some kind of time warp, because 8 weeks just went by in the blink of an eye.

I know that I didn’t pull a Rip Van Winkle and snooze through the whole summer because I remember things happening and being part of them. My wife and I did go down to the Vineyard while the kids were away in San Antonio at a conference, and we had a very relaxing time with my in-laws, my wife’s sister and her husband and their two awesome kids. We also went up to Vermont for a weekend in late July to attend a family reunion for my wife’s family. We hung out and talked with people we hadn’t seen in four years, we went tubing down the Battenkill River, and we ate a lot of good food. My brother who lives in Canada came down for a week or so and we got to see him and his wife at a cookout with my family. We went to a couple of parties down the Cape with friends and there were so many people in their back yard there was almost no room for my chair. We had some friends visit from Texas and spent a great afternoon reminiscing with them. We spent time with some of our good friends and counted our blessings that we have such awesome kids. My wife and I celebrated our 23^rd Anniversary in August. Looking back now, I guess we really did enjoy the summer.

So summer is almost gone and fall is just around the corner, like it or not. As I mentioned last year, I’m going to enjoy any summer-like days that happen to come along over the fall. There are still a lot of nice days to enjoy and it’s not like it will suddenly be freezing outside. Who knows, maybe we’ll have another mild winter like we did last year and we’ll be outside all the way to spring. Let’s just hope the next few months don’t go by as quickly as the last two. I’m still recovering from the whiplash.

Smooth Operator

Since everyone in the family has an iPod, we bought a connection cord for each car so we can listen to them through the car’s stereo system. As happens with so many things today, one of them is broken and the other one is falling apart but still works. On a recent Saturday I needed to drive my son to a friend’s house and was taking one car but had to get the working iPod connector out of the other car so we could listen to the music we wanted to. As I got back into the car I went to lean my arm on the center console like I always do when I get into the car. However, for some reason my son had opened it, so expecting something solid to lean on and finding nothing, I kind of stumbled into the car leaning over to his seat.

My being a klutz is nothing new to my kids as I do things like that a lot, which usually garners a few laughs, so of course my son laughed at me. He commented on how coordinated I was sometimes and how that particular incident was quite elegant. Actually, what he said was that it was “like a swan”. We both laughed and I mentioned that both he and my daughter got some of that DNA in them, because the both of them do klutzy things all the time, too. I won’t tell you how well my daughter wears her food sometimes or how my son knocks things over or trips on things because I don’t want to embarrass them by going into the details. Suffice it to say that we’ve all had our not so shining moments.

As we drove, I told him how when I was a teenager I could be walking through my living room and trip over nothing. My Mom once asked me how I could play sports and have such good balance but then walk through a room and stumble when there was nothing near me. The only explanation I have is that I had this special super-hero-like talent that only worked playing sports; at other times I was just like everybody else. When I was in school, I never ran up or down stairs because I knew there was a good chance I would fall on my face or my butt right in front of everyone. So I took it slow and played it cool – all while holding onto the railing. Heck, I could do the opening theme to the old Dick Van Dyke Show without trying.

My wife loves to tell the story about an incident that showed how much alike my Dad and I were. Here’s the setup: We were at my parent’s house, sitting in the living room, which was by no means small, and which had a coffee table that Mom kept some plants on up against the wall. Dad left the room for something and on his way back banged his leg on the coffee table. He basically walked right into the table. Of course, we all laughed. You would think that after seeing that happen I would be a little more careful, but a few minutes later I went to the bathroom and on my way back, you guessed it; I banged my leg on the coffee table. I basically walked into the same table that was in the same place in the same room that Dad had just moments before! Like father like son, I guess.

So we get to my son’s friend’s house and he gets out of the car to go up to the house. I always wait until my kids get in the house before I leave because you just never know what may have come up in the time since they spoke to their friend. This particular house is a two-story house and he had to enter on the second floor, which required him going up a set of stairs to the door. I’m sitting in the car watching him and all of a sudden his foot caught the step wrong, he stumbled and went down. If I hadn’t been watching him the whole time, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed, because he was up in a flash. As soon as he was back on his feet, he looked over to check if I had seen what happened. I just pointed at him and laughed as he laughed, too. I then took out my cell phone and texted him a very simple message: “Like a swan”. Like father like son, I guess.

You know, it’s great when your kids say or do something that is intelligent, creative or just plain nice, and people say “Your son is just like you!” or “Your daughter reminds me of you!”. Those are the kinds of things I hope I never forget as I grow older. Walking into a table two minutes after my Dad did the same thing or watching my son trip going up the stairs after telling me how uncoordinated I was, those are things that I know I’ll never forget. Those are the things that make us who we are – real, klutzy and human.