Return to School Is a Rite of Renewal : Labor Day: It’s a time to look forward--whether to freshly sharpened pencils or old friends in a new room.

I have always thought of Labor Day as the true beginning of the new year. It’s a much better holiday than the one we celebrate by lobotomizing ourselves with bad champagne, feigned fun and football. On Labor Day there are no dopey hats, no French kisses from strangers, no babies dropping into the world without blood or pain wearing Miss America banners. No one mopes about auld acquaintances or makes resolutions that are really just old regrets. On Labor Day everybody looks forward.

I suppose there was a time when the end of summer meant nothing to me, during that nanosecond when I wasn’t going back to school or watching my husband go back (and back) to school. But soon I had babies and it seemed that I thought of nothing but school. Or rather, I worried: Should I send my daughter to school A, where she would master phonics by age 3 but might be emotionally crippled, or to school B, where she would make her own writing implements, eat sprouted-wheat snacks and learn to read five minutes before taking the PSATs? Even last August, when my fondest wish came true--Charlotte got off the waiting list and into the school everyone wanted--I still worried. I probably was facing two years of social intercourse with 30 thin-lipped Lexus owners who would all wear makeup with Madras shorts.

But sometime around Labor Day, Charlotte’s excitement penetrated my fog of anxiety. “At my new school there’s a fireman’s pole and I think I’ll be a little scared to go down it, but my teacher’s going to help me,” she announced after Mrs. Huber’s home visit, just the way an adult might say, “I don’t speak a word of French, but I just got offered a free penthouse overlooking the Seine and I’ll be moving next week.”

I couldn’t remember whether I had felt that way before my first day of preschool (well, we didn’t even have preschool, it was nursery school then). But I did remember other things about school: the clean, smooth feel of brand-new loose-leaf binder paper, the smell of freshly sharpened pencils and perfectly rhomboid Pink Pearl erasers. To think of those things still gives me a small thrill of hope, still stirs in me some unaccountable conviction that this year will be the best of all.

Charlotte is already savoring that delicious combination of knowing the ropes and starting anew that comes with the beginning of every school year. “I’m going to the same school with the same kids,” she tells strangers at Safeway. “But this time I’ll be in the blue class instead of the red, and it will be different.”

Ring in the new.