Picture Adam Sandler singing his "back to school" bit from Billy Madison. That song's in my head. It always is this time of year. August for me is that song, the smell of grass clippings and the feel of starchy new denim.
The song didn't come around until I was already done with public education (that provides you with the date range that is more and more cumbersome to my psyche). It became really funny when I was a teacher. But August for me growing up was the month that brought the last few kick-arounds at the high school before soccer season started. The grounds crew really started to care about the grass in August (or so it seemed). They cut it more often. They watered it regularly. And they always seemed concerned about how many of us were playing on it. The grass was always there, though, and where there was grass, we were there. We played in August.
Usually around the same time, at some point in August, I would go school shopping. This was a strange ritual because it mixed the giddy excitement of acquiring "new stuff," with the ominous feeling that everything was about to become more important. Learning was about to have grades attached to it again. Friendships might be in jeopardy based on team placement or teacher assignments or locker locations. Girls would be there - every single day they would be there, not just on the rare beautiful and fleeting meetings that often happened in the summer. All of this importance was setting in just as the register was ringing up the notebooks and the Pee Chee folders and the pencils ("Mechanical ones, mom. Please? I hate sharpening pencils!"). There was the new clothing, too. To be sure, I thought the clothes were just as important as everything else. When I was growing up, new school clothes had to include new denim. Not "new-to-you" denim that already had holes, or that was already broken in. I'm talking about stiff, dark blue, hard to wear for at least a couple of weeks denim.
I spent the rest of August trying to break in the denim, and playing on the freshly cut grass, and wondering what in the world this new school year was going to be like. The possibilities soared overhead, and the demons tickled from underneath. In a more refined way, that same mindset remains as I write this first post of the new 2012-2013 school year. The possibilities this year are truly exciting. The demons will always lurk under me, and I will stand before them and do battle as I always do. But at some point this fall I'll catch a whiff of freshly cut grass, and I'll remember how the denim felt after breaking it in.
And then I'll remember that I pegged those jeans, and that I had a mullet, and I'll cringe and try to continue repressing my childhood. Here's to a new year, and the soaring possibilities it brings.
