The crack of September
There’s something ritualistic about the Tuesday after Labour Day, isn’t there?
I took my dog, Darcy, on his morning walk around the neighbourhood Tuesday, as the garbage trucks rumbled along (one each for compost, live waste, recycling and, I believe, Confederate statuary).
As they made their intermittent progress on our busy post-Labour Day streets, the “returnables” weren’t just the cans in the blue boxes. They were the children on their way back to class after a summer all too fast in the passing.
I ran into several parents, some with arms locked, huddled into each other, walking home after dropping kids off, their jaws slack and that look. Their eyes were a kaleidoscope of anxiety, confusion and reflection, like they’d just been picked for The Hunger Games or couldn’t find their cellphones.
“Ah,” I said to them. “First day. Been there, done that, have the tattoo.”
It’s traumatic. The unknown. The tears. The pulling away. Moms and dads letting out of their sights for whole days, entrusting to others, that which is so precious to them — the $1,800 Galaxyapple Tablet with iPro functionality that they bought for Junior, back-toschool special (it will be lost by lunch time).
At my house, this was a special year in a way.
Lucy, the younger of our two girls, reminded us, “This is my last first day.” She’s in Grade 12. We have a picture of her and Ruby together on our front steps for every year they’ve been in school, in their back-to outfits.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I replied. “You’re right. Last first day. Unless, of course, you fail.”
She glared admonishingly. “Don’t jinx me, dad.”
I assured her I was joking and that anyway ... what failure? This is Canada. There’s an ombudsman or something for that, isn’t there? “Ombudsperson,” she corrected. Back outside with Darcy, I observed to the parents I encountered on our walk that there’s something ritualistic about the Tuesday after Labour Day, isn’t there? Change of season, cycle of life. Children brought to the lip of the volcano, so to speak.
It’s a Lord of the Flies ceremony of “drowned innocence,” I mused, mixing up Yeats and Golding. The young people will have drawn up their list, by third period and mutual agreement, who’ll be ostracized this term and who’ll sit next to Colby in the caf.
Of course the parents, so harangued, would nod vacantly and make to move around me on the sidewalk, saying, “By the way, your dog chewed through the skin of that garbage bag and is licking something off that Stouffer’s box.”
“Thanks then, and hope your kids have a great ... Darcy, get out of there!”
Yes, September. I think of it as the crack in the year. The crack of summer snapping away from the remainder of the months to come.
The crack of the riding crop on our withers as school begins; work ramps up; shadows lengthen; fields start calling us to harvest and the economy calls us to market, to get a drop on our Christmas shopping even before Yom Kippur.
Trim the wicks. Hit the books. Put away the surfboard.
September. It’s the crack that the outdoor light and warmth begin to leak out of, depleting their stores as fall and winter deepen. We have to create our own light and heat, indoors, tungsten blazing, boilers boiling.
We have to teach our children; let them teach us. More than ever. The least we can do after preparing for them a world run by madmen with nuclear joysticks; bequeathing them an economy disemboweled of full-time jobs; pricing houses beyond their hope to ever own one; monumentalizing our worst mistakes, our most ignorant vanities and greed, instead of burning them on pyres.
Please don’t trash this generation and the one coming under it, with their texting, accusing them of not knowing how to communicate. We did such a good job, with our “fake news” and polarization. No, they’re the greatest generation. They’d better be. They’ll be changing our catheters.
Happy fall then, and a toast to new starts.