School Bus Ballet, Backpacks, and Twilight Optimism
August in its final stretch — as we have opined frequently as of late — had a way of pretending it is not yet finished. The days still pressed down with heat, though the nights began to draw in a little earlier, and our schedules teetered between summer’s looseness and the impending formality of the colder seasons. About town, this is the week when the season seems to fully embrace the contradictions at the heart of summer’s end: toward school bells and buses on one side, and toward the late, languid twilights on the other. We find ourselves watching the traffic differently, buying supplies in bulk, and clinging to the dusk with the hope that it will last a few minutes more.
School Bus Ballet
Despite the rising cost of living, there is still an affordable way for the average citizen to enjoy the ballet. There is no more delicate choreography than the morning commute when the yellow buses return and our cast of principals, the city’s hurried drivers, relearn awkwardly and all at once how to brake in time, how to guess the angle of the flashing stop sign, and how to calculate the odds of slipping through before the red lights begin their steady pulse. The movement itself is pure ballet, or at least something closer to a slot-car race, and it plays out a hundred times a morning to anyone brave enough to stand on a street corner with a cup of coffee and too much time on their hands.
Some succeed, gliding away smugly just before the accordion door folds open. Others arrive just too late, condemned to watch a single child shuffle up the steps, spiritually unburdened but physically weighted down by the small steamer trunk on his back, moving at a pace that suggests the hauling of a riverboat up a mountain. It is a performance we all participate in, willingly or not, and by the second week of September the steps have been memorized again: brake, sigh, wait, repeat. One begins to wonder if the true test of adulthood is not paying bills or filing taxes, but learning when not to gamble against a flashing stop sign.
Backpacks
As noted a few weeks ago in this column, retailers know that nothing moves product quite like the promise of fresh starts. End-caps groan with notebooks and pencils, bins overflow with markers that will go dry before October (or vanish into a junk drawer alongside soy sauce packets and rubber bands), and every checkout line includes a parent debating the relative virtues of mesh pockets and reinforced straps. But the most delightful trend to have emerged in the last twenty years is the sheer variety of backpacks now available, ranging from the ever-reliable plainly colored canvas to wildly colorful prints designed to test not only the limits of a school’s dress code, but of the human eye itself. The selection of a backpack seems to us one of the great modern forms of self-expression for a child of a certain age, and while we enjoy the variety as we see them speckle the sidewalks along our morning commute, we cannot help but feel relief that our own choices once amounted to something like black, tan, red, blue, or green. There are simply too many choices in some aspects of life, and the kaleidoscope of backpack patterns feels like one of them.
Regardless, the backpacks are a vital part of the modern student uniform, stuffed to improbable dimensions, dangling keychains and water bottles like trophies. For children, they are both burden and badge—proof that summer is truly over and that an entire mobile office must now be carried daily on narrow but developing shoulders. For the rest of us, they are a reminder that the year has entered its industrious half, when supplies are purchased not for pleasure but for duty. At least until someone designs a backpack big enough to hold September itself, at which point we’ll gladly buy two.
Twilight Optimism
Even as the stores declare autumn, we and our neighbors engage in an ongoing crusade to keep evenings firmly in the realm of summer for just a few days longer. The light lingers long enough for kickball in cul-de-sacs, for free throws at the hoop bolted precariously above the garage, and for games of all varieties (including, although we are loath to say it, pickleball) that outlast the mosquitoes. Adults still tend their grills and sprinklers, as if the season could be held in place by force of routine, while children negotiate with the encroaching dark for “one more inning.”
This, like so many other moments in life, is part of a fleeting interval. These last August nights, when both worlds overlap, seem almost futile, as we attempt to stave off responsibility a little longer for the promised fancy of warmer weather that we wish we could dwell in forever. But time waits for none of us—the industrious or the idle—and our attempts to steal a little more light are always in vain. Besides, September has never been known to grant overtime, no matter how loudly we argue our case in the cul-de-sac.