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?

PBJ

I bring my lunch to work almost every day. Part of the reason is because it is much less expensive to make your own lunch than it is to buy it somewhere every day, but another part of it is that I don’t want to have to go out and get it all the time. However, there are some days, like this morning, that there are no leftovers and nothing to make a sandwich with. So on some of these days, I just make the old standby – peanut butter and jelly. I don’t want to have a PBJ sandwich every day, but every once in a while is alright with me. Actually, there are times in the winter on a Saturday afternoon that a toasted PBJ just hits the spot. The peanut butter a gooey, melty mess and the jelly nice and warm – yum!

There was a time when I was a kid that I had a PBJ sandwich almost every day for lunch. The only times I didn’t, I had a peanut butter and fluff sandwich (a fluffernutter). That’s how much I loved peanut butter. Even when I started elementary school (I didn’t go to kindergarten) I still had PBJs or fluffernutters for lunch because I brought my lunch to school most of the time the first few years. It wasn’t that the school lunches weren’t good; they were much better back then than they are now. They actually made the food in the school kitchen in those days.

To this day, I still vividly remember a day in second grade when I thought my lunch was ruined – and probably my life with it. We used to get to school a little early and hang around outside, playing with our friends. Sometimes we played with a football or played catch with a baseball. This particular day, there was one guy throwing a rubber ball off the brick wall of the school to a pack of us to see who could get “three outs” first and become the guy to do the throwing. It was intense and we were going after the ball like there were two outs in the ninth inning of the seventh game. Guys were getting run into, pushed out of the way and even knocked down. We were having a blast!

The bell rang, signaling the end of our fun and the start of classes. My teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly, was an older, no-nonsense teacher, so when she came out to get us, we didn’t mess around. It was near the beginning of the year, but I already knew to do what she told you. I quickly went to pick up my jacket and my lunch and then I noticed it. My lunch was squashed. Someone had stepped on it and flattened out my brown bag lunch. I picked it up and slowly opened it to see a PBJ pancake. The tears started welling up in my eyes as I contemplated my poor, flat, mutilated PBJ sandwich. I held it out in front of me, finding Mrs. O’Reilly through my tears. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. I was in such a state of shock I couldn’t even speak.

She was looking at me, probably trying to figure out where I was bleeding. I just held my mangled lunch bag up to her. She looked at it, looked at me, and said in a slightly annoyed manner, “What’s the problem?” What’s the problem? WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?!?! Was she blind? I thought it was pretty obvious.

Between heaving breaths I managed to get out the horrible truth, “Someone stepped on my lunch!” Again, she looked at my lunch, looked at me, and in a noticeably more annoyed manner said “You can still eat it, it’s just a little flat!” She handed it back and I stared at her in disbelief. Couldn’t she see that my lunch was ruined? Heck, my whole day was ruined! Obviously she didn’t understand, because she started to push me toward the door and into the school. My classmates were all looking at me, wondering if I was OK, that I must have gotten hurt. But the only thing that was hurt right then was my feelings. I remember thinking something to the effect that my Mom would NEVER have done that.

Lunch time came and I took out what was once my wonderful PBJ sandwich, trying to conceal it from everyone else. I was embarrassed to have to eat such a pitiful sandwich, but eat it I did. I think I even fought back a few tears from my eyes at lunch, too. When it was done, Mrs. O’Reilly came by and asked me if my lunch was OK. I hated to admit it, but my sandwich tasted just fine, even if it was about an eighth of an inch thick. She smiled at me and patted me on the head the way adults do and I couldn’t help but smile back. That day I learned that Mrs. O’Reilly wasn’t such an old Meany after all, that she was actually pretty nice.

I also learned something else that day. Call it a life lesson, call it a metaphor for life. Sometimes your lunch is going to get stepped on and squished, and you have a choice to make: you can sit there and cry about it, or you can pick it up and eat it anyway. That day, for probably the first time in my life, with the help of a wise teacher, I chose to eat it anyway.