School Time

A bow on view of the Surprise. Her top speed under sail is 14 knots far in excess of the 10 knots with her diesels. Her hull has begun hogging, the middle is up and the bow and stern down. This isn't to the panic stage yet. You can see her at sea in “Master and Commander.” Photo: Festival of Sail, 2010.

Yesterday and Today Himself: Worked from dawn to late to get all the old ones out of the way and finished. He has an eight in the morning appointment so will miss swimming. Herself: …and the quilt blog too: Swam, wrote, did the usual but forgot bread and probably some other things. Making the menu and shopping list on the computer simplified things as I just copied and pasted onto a two column spread. Trying a new turkey chili recipe that got five stars from the cooking channel. Only forty more blocks to cut on the quilt. Pain in hip vastly better so today won’t take any Aleve but will take it very easy. Dinner out with Don. My Babylonian Captivity: Do stop in and read Tugster's experience as a human shield. He writes that, “ i was captured in kuwait (where i was teaching in the kuwaiti air force)….” Gratitude: Don about my old cards. Sunshine and cool air here on the Point….oh, my, that is nice stuff.

My neighborhood is one of those mixed use places. One block up the hill is a small, older strip mall. There’s a fancy new library across the street….marble, imagine. Four blocks away is the old Richard Henry Dana Jr. High, now a middle school, that houses fifth and sixth graders. Two long blocks down the hill is Correia Middle School….which used to be named for the man who donated the land, Collier Jr. High School. Seventh and eighth grades there.

Maybe I should call it a mixed name place.

Two blocks up the hill is the four year High School. Right now life is semi quiet there. The band isn’t practicing. Football hasn’t started. Even the students walking home past our house are quiet. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention and school hasn’t started yet. I deliberately haven’t driven past the High School yet to see the lines of busses, to see the crowds of kids at the donut shop, to see the flock of cop cars cruising by the fast food Mexican spot.

But I know the Middle School is open. I saw the parents dropping the kids in the no-stopping curb. I saw two teachers babysitting the hundreds of kids at the entrance gates. It’s early yet in the year, so parents are encouraging the kids to cross at the cross walk. We don’t have to play dodge-em teen on our way home from the gym yet.

The summer that never came is now gone, and the kids have crowded back into our neighborhood poking our humor, forcing us to think outside our middle aged boxes, and expanding our views of the world. They know they are going to live forever. We know we are not. I for one appreciate that thinking until I almost run over one or two of the kids. It’s time for me to take another road out of the neighborhood until I get used to them again.