Savouring the sweet freedom of summer

There are things I wish that I knew when I was young: to stretch more, and turn the music down, to hold onto the comic book collection under my bed. Here is something else that did not dawn on me until it was too late: although there may be joyful moments in an adult’s life — a hole-in-one, a negative blood test at the Dickson Building, a $10 bill found in an old pair of jeans — little can rival the delight, the bliss, the thrill of walking out of your elementary school as students across Nova Scotia will do this Thursday, and realizing that it will be two months before you must file back in again.

I know this because for the past 30 years I have lived next to one elementary school and across the street from another, and also because once I burst through those same doors as the kids at St. Joseph’s-alexander Mckay will exit on June 30.

I would have been sprinting because I seldom walked anywhere back then. After days of staring longingly out of the window at the big hardwoods that still surround the school, my pre-teen body might have vibrated, perhaps giving off a low hum of excitement, as I sat at my desk.

I imagine we yelled something, perhaps a yee-haw like the Cisco Kid, galloping towards the exit. I believe that once outside we threw our Hilroy scribblers, Campfire notebooks, and coloured construction paper adorned with the constellations and cloud formations into the air from where, in my sepia-tinted memory, they floated slowly down over the school children below.

I know one thing for certain, because it is with me still at this time of year: the feeling of absolute liberation that came from knowing that the endless sitting and listening, the adding and subtracting, the reading about Dick and Jane, was over for the foreseeable future.

At that stage, we did not realize the sad truth: that summers would not always be like that, and our sweet window of freedom would be woefully brief.

Soon, things would be expected of us when school adjourned for the year. By high school, maybe even sooner, the industrious kids would have summer jobs.

We certainly had no idea that when full-time work began, we would, at best, get a couple of weeks off in the summer — and that we would have to wait until the senior’s discount arrived before the summers would be completely ours again.

Kids, at least everyone I knew, lived moment to moment. When the last bell rang, we were not thinking in terms of months, or even weeks and days.

If a parent, teacher, or cubmaster had, at that point, warned us that life does not last forever and that we had better find some purpose for ours, they might as well have been speaking Klingon.

There would be time for that later on. These were the innocent days, before five-year career plans, and the notion of leading purposeful lives, when time unspooled so slowly that it seemed endless.

Kids who went to cottages or spent the vacation months adventurously road-tripping may have had structure in their lives. I mostly stayed put in Halifax.

Other than the occasional swimming lesson and little league baseball game, I was left gloriously on my own in those be-back-before-streetlights-go-on days.

I do not want to give you the wrong impression: there were no flights of imaginative fancy, no hints of a life of ingenuity to follow in the ways we found to entertain ourselves.

But our television set had only two channels, and the telephone rang a couple of times a day.

So, a canoe paddle and a tennis ball allowed us to be Roberto Clemente. A bicycle with a hockey card in the spokes became a motorcycle like the ones we saw on re-runs of Highway Patrol.

We wiled away hours on weird games Macgyvered out of nothing, and traded comic books with the serious intent of ancient Phoenicians.

Our world, in those days, was just a few city blocks. That was enough because we were in no hurry and had time to wander, like short-panted Richard Kimbles, finding things worthy of attention in backyards, alleys, construction sites, and vacant lots.

On the other hand, I remember a lot of time just spent sitting around, fallow periods as I waited for the newest Daredevil to appear in the comic racks at Faders Pharmacy — relocated to my neighbourhood after being looted during the V-E Days — and for the postman to deliver the army of civil war soldiers I had ordered from the back of another comic, which turned out to be as sturdy as the plastic toys in the middle of a frozen Buried Treasure.

It sounds, to a 21st century inhabitant used to constant stimulation, mind-numbingly boring. The thing is that we knew no better. We had no understanding of the tribulations of life that would follow. Our worldview was simple.

No wonder the summers of yore will always seem great. We were kids. Soon the serious business of life would be upon us. Just not yet.