The Last Week of School

(from Saturday Evening Post, May 1994)

Suppose I remind you of that final week before school closed for summer vacation. Of how you would be sitting at your desk, sweating and sleepy, in a room turned white from the diamond-bright June sun blasting in from the Washington state sky.

And of how every once in a while, just before you dozed off, a hot breeze would swirl around the room, fluttering papers on desks and making the blinds flap before it passed out through the window again.

And suppose I remind you that soon millions of kids will be daydreaming their way through the last week of school. In fact, there will be so much daydreaming going on that if daydreams were humingbirds, the air would be filled with whirring blurs of birds hovering above schools from coast to coast like a veil of summer desire.

Who does not remember the last week of school? who does not remember what it's like to be a kid so dizzy with the idea of summer that you are oblivious to everything but the promise of freedom?

Like a sea-weary sailor trying to sight land, you sit slumped in your seat -- the back of your clothes sticking to the plintered wooken chair -- and scan the horizon outside. And when you tire of that, you watch, trancelike, as a trapped bublebee bumps up against the window, trying to escape. So intense is you concentration you do not hear poor Mrs. Hershey valiantly trying to review Ivanhoe. But you do notice that Mrs. Hershey is wearing lilac-shaped enamel earrings.

It was the fifth grade -- a time when summer was unconditionally summer. A time before summer jobs and summer romances. A time when summer stretched out ahead of you like the Kansas prairies -- endless and uncharted.

So you sat in Mrs. Hershey's class and dreamed of sleeping late and waking to the smell of sizzling bacon and new-mowed grass. And you dreamed of playing Monopoly and Rish on the screened-in porch that remained cool on the hottest days because it was shaded by a huge willow tree.

You dreamed about wearing white shorts and bright colored singlets. And knowing the pleasure of walking barefoot on damp sand on the beach, on cool grass, on rain-soaked asphalt.

You dreamed of fireworks, and hot dogs grilled in the back yard, dripping with mustard and pickle relish. Dessert was watermelon with its juice slipping off your elbows and spitting seeds at your cousins.

You also dreamed of weekend trips in the family car: of starting out at 5 a.m. and stopping, ravenous, for pancakes and maple syrup at a small town diner on the highway.

But most of all, sitting in Mrs. Hershey's class, during the last week of school, you'd dream of your first day at the lake: of the smell of baby oil and the sight of pale bodies. You'd dream of that first contact with the water and the sensation of diving through a line that divided noise from silence. Of how late in the afternoon, with the smell of seaweed heavy in your hair, you'd be on your way home in the car while, ever so gently, the steady rhythm of the wheels set you dozing on the floor in the backseat of the car, while brothers and sisters were sleeping on each other in the backseat. The smallest one is dozing on mom's lap in the frontseat.

Dozing just as you are now, in Mrs. Hershey's fifth-grade class during the last week of school.