Back to School

When I think of my childhood growing up in Bayside, Queens in the 1950’s, I think of the summer, green and enveloping.

PS 46, the public school that I went to, had a free camp in the school yard during the summer, where I spent many happy hours running, playing punch ball and becoming a knock hockey champ, setting me on course to winning the Public School Athletic League award for the third grade, including boys and girls.

Come September, it was Back to School.  Sharpen your pencils!  I remember the five and dime store on 73rd Avenue near Bell Boulevard where my mother bought all my back to school supplies – pencils, erasers, rulers, pencil cases and ruled composition books.  I loved that store. I loved the smell of the wooden floors and the wooden display cases.

Every fall I would get a new plaid skirt and a plaid jumper, red, navy and green were the colors - summer madras and white cotton eyelet tops morphed into tartan plaids; summery colored frocks and shorts turning into darker hues.

The fall was the future, endless possibilities - if summer was the womb, fall was a rebirth.  Forward march – art, learning, friends, all us kids lining up in the school yard with our Roy Rogers and Mouseketeer lunchboxes chock full of tuna sandwiches and Twinkies – ready to blast off.

Now fall has other connotations.  As the weather begins to shift and turn, as the dog days of August, suddenly, imperceptivity becomes another animal, I begin to shift myself.  It is a tumult, a cacophony of colors, a turbulence of feelings and colliding emotions; a shape-shifter which heralds the end of childhood and replaces it with the toil and sorrows of life.

I became an artist and gravitated towards creativity as a way to replicate my childhood and stop time.  Every summer, just to be sure, I make the pilgrimage back to Bayside to recharge my batteries for the coming year.

This summer as the weather began to change, I feverishly looked through my closet for anything plaid.

Holding my plaid skirt aloft I thought of Shakespeare’s “second childhood” in All The World’s a Stage and in my version, vow to return to my glory days, my school days where the present and the future are intertwined.

As I stroll down Lexington Avenue on a gloriously beautiful September day, I maneuver past fourworkmen who are trying to push a large refrigeration unit through a small entranceway of a health food store.  The neighborhood is hopping and popping and everyone is in high spirits, notwithstanding the inconvenience of this exercise. 

I am filled with an inexplicable joy.  Yes!

Back to School everyone!