Summer Breezes

This is the last week for the regular school year in these parts. Classroom sessions are down to half days as the kids bring in cupcakes, drinks, and other party snacks to celebrate the end of the school year. This past year has really been an eye opener for me. I really got to see up close and personal the youth of today. From the kindergarten virgins to the cynical and hard core high schoolers who are ready to take on the world to the lost in space college kids wondering what life is really going to throw at them in a few years time.

It has been an informal study. Psyc and Sociology are so long in my past that I can’t remember much of those "head banging"classes or what we were supposed to get out of them. (Something about our mother and breastfeeding and being in bed?) Kids I can say are resilient. They can be the best of friends one minute, mortal enemies the next and best buds by the time they get off the bus. They are remarkable in that they are like soft clay and can be formed and molded into any shape if you let them. Some more willing than others and some seem to cast themselves with the ease of a soft summer breeze.

That’s what I’m talking about, a soft summer breeze. I remember the anticipation of the last weeks of school, almost as they were a couple of years ago. (Yesterday is too soon, the short term memory is the first to go so it’s a few years back.) Wondering if all the slacking off and day dreaming all term was about to come home to roost on the final day of school, when the report cards were handed out. Did I pass? That was the main question. Not how well I did, but did I pass! The last weeks of June in Junior High were glorious and also terrifying at the same time. I remember very clearly sitting in those old classrooms, with the large double hung windows and the up and down window shades, looking out to the grassy lawn between the school and the railroad tracks. Each of those classrooms had a unique smell to them, old chalk and damp paper towels. And if the janitor was going by, pushing his mop and bucket, the smell of pine disinfectant wafted across our desks as an unseen cloud summoning our senses to high alert, much like the fire siren just outside the school, for someone, somewhere, lost their lunch and it was clean up time.

The warm summer breeze would come into the classroom from outside, usually in the afternoon bringing with it the combined smells of the blacktop parking lot, the warm smell of the creosote railroad ties and at least once a week the smell of fresh cut grass and wild onions as the janitor would drive the tractor around the school grounds. The Janitor, for those who don't remember was of German descent. His name was Carl, I believe, but we called him Adolph behind his back. World War Two was over not quite twenty years while I strolled the hallowed halls of Oak Street Jr. High. Speculation ran wild about Carl's exploits during the war. We never even knew when he came from Germany. But to see him mount that tractor and engage his trusty rotating reel mower apparatus, it was almost if you could see, just squinting your eyes a little, that he was a member of Rommel's lost Afrika Korps headed into oblivion in the vast deserts of North Africa taking on the enemy of crabgrass and dandelions.

As those last weeks seemed to drag by, as we waited for the inevitable, I would keep time by the trains passing by outside the windows. The faded olive drab Pullman Green on those well worn trains with their fold over wicker seats would rattle by every half hour going either to Gladstone or Hoboken. I had the schedules memorized and would often slip away during the summer, at the first opportunity, to ride the rails to watch the World Trade Centers being erected or the quiet calm of the Millington Gorge and its trestle.

Finally that day would come and school would be out. With the dreaded report card in hand, and the next year's class assignment, we were sent into the world for ten weeks of bliss! As we would be exiting the classroom, for the summer, I can still remember Mr. Houtz, or Mr. Pataki, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder and a wink, relieving me of the total terror I was feeling regarding the report card. I knew it wasn't as bad as I had envisioned. Bad enough to hear the same old lectures about not doing enough in school but after a while it became an acceptable risk for the start of summer.

Those first days of vacation started the wheels of planning spinning. What to do, where to go, what adventures would be told in September. The first thing I did was always set up my tent in my back yard. That old canvas friend kept me safe and secure many a summer night. But the best part was just laying on the cot, with my eyes cast skyward, looking through the trees, daydreaming. I would drift into and out of sleep while the warm breeze of summer moved the leaves on the trees and played cat and mouse with the tent flaps. The overhead drone of some propeller plane would come and go and I would imagine the people headed to different places.

Soon the summer would be drawing to an end. Those warm days and nights would soon be gone and the breeze that moved the air around before air conditioning would soon bring winters chill. As September came we always had one last blast and that was the Kiwanis Fair at Oak Street. Those vast plains that Rommel's alter ego would practice his battlefield moves would become alive with tents and rides and games and food. It was the end all to a always perfect, but somehow surprisingly short, summer. A summer we hoped and planed for that today is a distant memory.

Those old trains have been replaced with cookie cutter sterile aluminum tubes, the Fair is no longer held in September, and Oak Street School has been enlarged and is probably air conditioned and Adolph has finally hung up his riding crop and goggles and his ghost rides the fields of glory while the choirs of angels sing the praises of Valkyrie.

I've long since moved away but just for a moment, I can be anywhere, and close my eyes and I'm thrust back 45 years into that old classroom waiting for summer to begin. Feeling that warm summer breeze surround my soul and take me back in time.