The Dog Days of Summer

These are the hottest, most sultry days of summer. They seemed to always coincide with those last few days before we returned to school, and a routine we knew well.

By the time the Dog Days arrived in August we had been without our usual ways of doing things for a couple of months. While we loved the freedom, there was also a desire to see people again who were usually only encountered in a school setting. This is just the way it was, people took vacations at different times and we would lose touch with one another. I don't remember how long it took to re-connect once we resumed school, not long I imagine, but it seemed by the Dog Days that we had been out of school for quite a while.

I lived adjacent to the school yard of Willard School and could literally look out my bedroom window to see who was there, and what sort of games were being played. By late August I knew not to look because there wouldn't be enough people to start a game of baseball, and even if there were it would be too hot and muggy to contemplate choosing up sides.

I suppose the thing which kept us going, if we were around during this miserable stretch of the summer and not out of town on vacation, was thinking about the alternative: sitting in a hot classroom in September!

The days before our classrooms were air conditioned, as they are now in Ridgewood, were wretched for teachers and students alike. I know it's fine to be nostalgic about the simpler days, I do it all the time, but this one facet of growing up will never, ever seem like a pleasant idea. Nobody trying to learn in a hot, brick building could concentrate or think of anything except getting out of their school cloths and running around barefoot, including the teachers I would imagine.

We didn't have a centrally air-conditioned house until I was a junior in high school. I can clearly remember walking the two miles home from RHS during the dog days of my sophomore year. It was hot and I was carrying a ton of books. When I came home I shed my cloths and stood in front of a large fan for about 15 minutes. Of course, I then went outside to see what was going on in the school yard. Nothing was going to keep me inside by this time, heat or no heat. Even standing under a tree on a late summer afternoon was better than the alternative of sitting inside a school building. Every little breeze we felt made us thankful, even if we didn't verbalize it, that we were out and about. It's moments like these I suppose we will ponder later in life. Or as one of my favorite poets William Butler Yeats wrote, "When you are old and gray and full of sleep. And nodding by the fire." For that brief moment under the huge oak tree behind the principal's office we were both free and cool. There is nothing better in the world for my money.