Another school year

Folks are starting to talk about school getting ready to start again.

I suppose that can mean different things to different folks, particularly the younger students. For a lot of kids, it probably means new notebooks, pencils, crayons, etc. And nowadays it also means tissues and hand sanitizer and all kinds of stuff they have to have.

To me, while some of those things could be last minute purchases (except for the tissues because there were always some around, and the hand sanitizer, because it didn’t exist) it always meant the arrival, from Sears, Roebuck and Co., of a large cardboard box.

Inside that box was my school clothing for the year. Most of my stuff fit well enough, although there was an allowance for letting me “grow into” some of it. Shucks, I remember a kid down the street who had to roll his new jeans halfway up his calf. That was really having to grow into it.

Anyway, if the lists haven’t appeared yet, they will soon. I always envied the other kids who got bigger boxes of crayons than I did, containing an amazing myriad of colors. Imagine, a “flesh” colored crayon! Of course, I never exactly figured out whose flesh it was supposed to resemble – somebody pink, I guess. But still, all those crayons…

But it was a tradition of sorts to send kids off to school in new duds. Looking back, I guess it was supposed to give us a psychological incentive to get out there in our new clothes, in a new school year, and make straight A’s.

Did it work? Well, the “new” wore off the clothes soon enough, but it wore off the new school year even sooner. It only took a couple of days for me to remember that getting up in the morning might be fun for special events, but not when you have to do it five days a week, forever. Well, it seemed like forever until next summer. It was also practically forever until Saturday, and Christmas break was in another century.

I admit, I’m one of those folks who wishes I had worked a little harder at school, but wishing is one thing and doing is another. If I could do it all again, I’d probably goof off at every opportunity.

My one saving grace was that I, as one wise man once put it, could “rub a noun and verb together.” While most everyone else would moan when a test included a written part, I would rejoice. Give me a bit of knowledge along with pencil (or pen) and paper, and I could write a little essay, which would contain every indication that I actually knew what I was talking about.

I’m not saying that the teachers never caught it. I’m saying they’d often give me a better grade grade than I deserved, for sheer imagination.

Of course, my third grade teacher, Miss Coda, wanted to fail me. This was crushing because I had sworn undying love to Miss Coda – they shouldn’t let pretty young women teach impressionable third grade boys. They didn’t let her fail me because of my scores on something which was called, at the time, the Achievement Test.

The Achievement Test was a forerunner of the standardized tests of today, which have gone in and out of favor so often I’ve lost count. Maybe Miss Coda was right, and repeating the third grade might have done me some good. It’s too late to find out now; I wouldn’t fit into the seats of a third grade class today. And it might creep out the other students.

•••••

Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. In spite of the heat, I decided I had to do two things. And I did all right. Maybe it wasn’t quite as hot, or maybe I’m getting more used to the heat.

Anyway, the first thing was, I finally admitted that a section of my yard needed mowing. I cut my yard in sections now; works for me. I got out and did it, and was through before 9 a.m. that morning (that might have had something to do with me not collapsing).

It was then I decided to do the second thing, which would be more challenging – not from physical labor, but from the heat itself, because of the time of day I’d be doing it. I decided that I didn’t care if the trees were spontaneously combusting around me, I was going to cook out.

I love grilling, and it had been a while. And while I will never try to claim any fame for my ability, I know something that every outdoor cooker has known, since the first caveman put a piece of meat on a stick and held it over the campfire: Quite simply, it’s that you’d almost be having to try messing up, to fail at grilling. Unless you fall asleep and let it burn, or baste it with Clorox or something, any piece of meat cooked over an open fire or coals is going to taste good.

And it did. In fact, it was yummy. Worth the sweat.