The power of E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake" is in its ability to make us immediately nostalgic for our own lost summertimes. For as he pointed out, there is only just so far you can go back in time before you realize you can't.
To be a teacher is also to be trapped in your own schooldays to a certain extent. Your year runs September to June and when the school year lets out you dash out of the building skipping and laughing for the two months of freedom that lay blessedly ahead. Or at least that is how your typical non-teacher imagines the end of the year.
In truth, I find myself grumpy, short with my kids and wife, restless and dissatisfied with my day when it is finally over. I go through this every June and it wasn't until this year that I figured out the reason for my doldrums. Or, to be more truthful, I had the reason explained to me by a close friend and fellow teacher who took one look at me as I stepped out my front door and said, "You're in a grumpy mood."
She was right. I was. And I didn't know why. An hour later after sitting grumpily on her back deck watching the kids play, she explained that it was the lack of school that made me grrrrr at everyone. I missed the routine, I missed the daily goals, the daily accomplishments, the activity level. Seemingly in an instant, my daily existence had lost its compass. It made so much sense and since then I've reflected on this dual-edged sword known as summer vacation.
Sure, the break is welcome. And, yes, the chance to start over with a new bunch of kids is essential. But two months? When I was a child, two months seemed forever (except those last few days before school started). Now, two months seem like the torture of having too much to do and only a limited amount of time to get it done. Only it's supposed to be a vacation. To be a teacher is also to be forever a child in this way: it arrives and sixteen years of habit kick back into gear and I expect to have two months off with nothing to do but lie under the maple trees, swim at the pool, take a midnight drive to Long Beach and walk the boardwalk. I am conditioned to see summer vacation as my time when I was free to stay out all day and into the night when the fireflies vanished before I could catch them and reappeared just over there out of reach.
But it's not my time. At least how I would choose to spend it. Partly, it's more my children's time than mine and I can't begrudge them that. It is time for the family vacations with the cousins (to make memories my sister keeps telling me), trips to the pool, trips to the movies for yet another cliched children's movie. It is time for bickering and constant fighting and getting on each other's nerves as the humidity settles in and the air conditioners are still not in the windows. It is time for sunscreen, yet again, to be applied to three pairs of legs, three pairs of arms, three faces (not my lips, Dad!) three necks -- the back and underneath (why there when the sun doesn't go there?!) and three pairs of ears -- two of which still stick out too far. And why do they keep inching farther away from me causing my shoulders and back to ache when all I'm trying to do is prevent a little skin cancer later in life!
And of course it is also time for those other kids of mine, the ones I've gotten rid of and the ones yet to be named. Forty recommendations to be written, curriculum to be revised, lessons to be created, materials to be reviewed. Plus there are those classes I have to take as well as plan, to keep up that certification, to keep my practice up to date, my instruction effective, my brain malleable.
I was reading a purely enjoyable, frivolous fantasy novel, George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. You may have heard of it as HBO just made it into a new series. The book is seven hundred pages or so and I enjoyed just about every one; yet, I still felt that itch in the back of my mind that told me time was running short and there were so many more necessary things I needed to be doing. And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that there was not nearly enough time to get everything I had to do done and still have time to enjoy my summer the way I wanted to: under the maple trees with a book in my hand and another by my side. I think of E.B. White in the little boat with his son, quietly fishing, quietly watching the dragonfly settle, stir and then resettle at the end of the pole. And I know that can't be the accurate truth. Where was the incessant talking, the constant questioning, the whining about the food or the heat or the uncomfortable thwart the kid was sitting on for hours? But the description was only a few lines, and maybe, frankly, unlike what Dillard would have us believe, that was as long as the moment lasted. The dragonfly flew off and the son let out an exasperated sigh and said, "I'm bored. When are we going back home?"
You see, in my childhood, there were lots of those moments being bored, being underfoot, being aggravating. But I don't remember them so well now. I just remember the freedom and the fun and those memories haunt me now. When did summer become work? You see, summer is work, it's just a different kind of work and I can't seem to explain this to my non-teacher friends who boo-hoo at me for two months off and wave their hands uncomprehendingly at just how difficult it is to be off for summer vacation.
Sometimes I think I'd like to be a farmer instead of a teacher. Sunrise to sunset and there is always something to do. Year round. That is the indelible pattern of life: work. This whole summer off thing is just an illusion, a dream, a false expectation that leaves you disappointed in so many ways because it is not the summer vacation of childhood. It is not. It is a lot of things, but it is hardly a vacation.
