How precious is a day with your kids? Yesterday, a Wednesday, was the first of our children’s summer vacation; when it dawned, their ten- and twelve-year-old minds were agog at the prospect of three months unencumbered by the need to wear shoes or learn anything. Of course, eighty-something days with no school is more appealing for the kids than it is for the grownups who have to keep them fed, watered, and productively entertained, particularly for parents whose jobs require them to keep putting on shoes and showing up, whatever season it is. Like lots of others in our position, we’re responding by stringing together a haphazard series of summer camps, babysitting gigs, play dates, visits with grandma, and, when all else fails, time spent with pencils, paper, and probably an iPad, hanging out at Mom and Dad’s office. Since my wife and I both work at the magazine, the kids will be dragging down the median staff age at our downtown Baton Rouge office on more than a few days this summer. So it’s good that they are finally old enough to be dropped off around the corner at LASM’s Planetarium or the LSU Museum of Art with twenty bucks and the expectation that they’ll manage to entertain themselves without breaking anything or falling in the river. I’m not sure how long it’ll be before they start asking to be dropped off at the mall instead, but no one’s mentioned it, and I’m not going to be the first to do so.
But that is tomorrow. Yesterday arrived too soon on the heels of school for structured activities to have gotten underway, so we had to shoot the gap. We did what working parents in these situations have done since work was invented: we drew straws. And depending on how you look at it, mine might either have been the short or the long one, because I got to stay home. True, staying home meant getting up at four in the morning to finish off an article before the distractions began. Granted, it meant fielding emails and phone calls while mediating minor squabbles and poorly executed sandwich construction. And yes, it has meant a long list of things to catch up on back at my desk this morning. But in the final analysis, the opportunity to witness their first, glorious, unencumbered, day of summertime freedom was worth the schedule scramble. Between a chicken-coop-expansion project, the ceremonial burning of last-semester’s homework, and the arrival of some cousins to play a game involving everything in the costume box, the day blew by like a summer storm. Before we knew it Mom was home, mildly surprised to find the kids fed, not terribly sunburnt, and fairly content. Having negotiated the first day of summer vacation with four children in my care, without losing any to hunger, exhaustion, snakebite, food poisoning, or sibling rivalry, I was feeling quite pleased with myself. One down, eighty-three to go.
Remember William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies? Things went all right at the beginning there … until the kids started to get bored. Three months is a long time, and we’re going to have to be creative to get through it. It’s an oft-repeated trope that the long American summer vacation is “a legacy of the farm economy,” an anachronistic leftover from the time when our agrarian forefathers (and foremothers) needed child labor to get the harvest in more than they needed children who knew trigonometry. Whether that’s true or not, I have to say that right now, having something that needs harvesting doesn’t seem a bad solution. Today I talked to a man about my age who remembered his summer vacation starting when a log truck loaded with oak tree trunks pulled up in his front yard. His father handed him and his teenaged brother a chainsaw and a couple of splitting mauls and told them to get busy. Three months later, they returned to school having chopped firewood for the entire neighborhood. Another summer, this enterprising dad showed up with a forty-gallon barrel full of mismatched nuts and bolts and told his boys he would give them twenty bucks if they matched them up. Maybe that generation of parents, lacking iPads and theatre camps, had the right idea. If three months ago I had put in a couple dozen acres of corn or soybeans, yesterday I could’ve just given each kid a scythe and a box of sandwiches, offered a reward for the largest haystack, and left them to it. There’s always next year.
In the meantime, whether our twenty-first-century school calendar revolves around nineteenth-century harvest cycles or not, it has certainly developed a sophisticated summer-camp economy to fill the void. Certainly, we two working parents will make our contribution to that economy throughout this harvest cycle. But until the camps start, I’ll be glad to steal a day here and there to stay home with the kids because I’m not so old as to have forgotten the feeling of waking up on the first day of summer vacation, with all those golden weeks stretching out before me. Even if those days are gone and not coming back, it’s still good to live vicariously once in awhile.
