Good Morning, Class

Each year’s calendar presents a parcel of markers, like recurring flagstones in our life path, prompting recall of where we were at the same point in past years. New Year’s is an obvious one. Halloween is another--who forgets the musty-plastic smell inside those stamped masks? Christmas morning. The unparalleled anticipation of the last day of school. And now, with summer’s waning days comes its reverse image: the exciting first day of a new school year.

Yes, year-round academic sessions can cause school vacations to erupt outside summer like some calendrical mutant, meaning that for about 330,000 of Los Angeles’ 722,000 public school pupils September falls somewhere in the middle of the school year. But ritual back-to-school sales seem forever set in the sunbaked days of August, just as Labor Day end-of-summer memories are set in the minds of generations of adults. A palpable excitement reigns in the retail aisles. Little people actually planning what clothes they’ll wear that first day, plans that will doubtless change often before the first class bell. Family teams of youngsters and parents, soon to bicker over bedtimes, confer cooperatively on desired styles and colors.

New notebook candidates prompt long, animated studies--the variables carefully pondered before hard decisions are made. The age-old pros and cons of thin-and wide-lined paper are debated. Backpacks require careful consideration, as do the doodads to hang from zippers.

The younger ones are excited over lunchboxes with cartoon characters, much like a generation 50 years ago weighing Hopalong Cassidy against Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. And is there anything fresher than a stiff, new, un-sat-upon box of still-pointed crayons with this year’s new colors?

Yet to come, of course, is the excitement--and maybe a wince of fear--over new friends to be made, the anticipation of unknown teachers to meet, new books to thumb and a desk that, judging by Neolithic crumbs captured within, is not new but is newly assigned. The night-before nerves. The morning-of photo on the same front porch spot as last year. Maybe a few secret tears--on both sides. Not likely that most grownups would willingly relive those juvenile days. But the fresh faces, childish innocence and uncalculated excitement of others close by are not a bad late-summer lesson to carry into another adult day.

At least until the Great Halloween Costume Decision Day.