This is the town of "year-round" school. I talked to my mother earlier, the retired teacher, and she has never heard of such a thing. The fuuhh? Isn't there year-round school in every town now, or do I truly live in the asshole of the East Coast, where everything must be revised, redistricted, re-zoned, and repackaged? How about regurgitated?
Okay, so I can see the benefits of year-round, and I will be eating the words I wrote in the previous paragraph next year at this time when I'm working 15 or more hours outside the home and have to pay for child care for two kids instead of one. Plus I'll have a supremely bored 6-year-old instead of a somewhat bored 5-year-old clamoring at my heels for more stuff to do. Hopefully my fifteen-plus hours a week will be able to pay for said stuff, and it'll be a non-issue. There's also the pesky clinical research that shows year-round educated children to be superior in their test scores, having had less temporal interference between bouts of learning. Whatever. I'm such a curmudgeon, being all of 41 years old, and I have my weird attachment to this animal called "summer vacation," like many others my age. True, the animal has changed quite a bit. Gotten fat. Instead of thriving on same-age neighbors, mud pies, cul-de-sacs and bikes, it now enjoys a less spicy mix of back yard toys with the boring siblings, parent-initiated art activities, and streaming Netflix.
Along the same curmudgeonly lines, in the above-mentioned conversation with my mother we talked about our perceptions of relationships with grandchildren. Av was quite upset when my mom's recent week-long visit ended, and my mom expressed some surprise at this. She holds that when we were kids, we barely spent any time with her parents, Bob and Helen (Pappy and Grammy, to us kids). The weird thing is, I feel like we saw them all the time. Or at least I never felt deprived of their presence the way Av seems to feel about her grandmother. True, my mom is the only grandparent she has. I had the full complement of four grandparents until I was ten or so. But my mom pointed out that the memories I have of Bob and Helen are really memories of playing on the farm with my cousins, with Grammy and Pappy in the distant background putting up with our presence on their property. To illustrate, Mom reminisced out loud about the time that we went to visit them at their winter home in Key West, and my grandfather's motorbike somehow became broken that week, although it was functional the week before and he was able to get it "fixed" the moment we were on the plane home. He just didn't want a 16-year-old and a 13-year-old riding it, even though there were less than three miles of paved grounds in their double-wide retirement community, and the speed limit was probably 20. Yeah, old Pappy was a bit of sourpuss. But hey, I didn't know that at the time and I had a blast in Key West. As I did at the farm, and what I remember is not that Pappy holed up in his barn caressing his ancient motorcycle collection until we were gone, or that Grammy stood methodically in front of her kitchen sink waiting for the kids to stop abusing her old piano. I remember all kinds of fun times, and it seemed to me that our grandparents were a part of it. I can only hope that Av's twice-a-year visits with her cousins will stretch out in her memory as much more than that, the way mine did. Thank goodness for the distorted cognitions of childhood. Or more hopefully, the inaccurate memories of curmudgeonly adults.
