Dreams of trained raccoons fade in August

Can it really be August already? It seems like the snow has just melted, and summer is already almost gone.

Oh, I know that there’s plenty of warm weather left before the air chills and the leaves tremble orange and red, but when you’ve spent your life hopping from square to square on a school calendar, the start of August means the beginning of the end of summer.

Once I entered kindergarten in 1953, I didn’t leave school for more than a half-century. First it was grammar school, then high school, then college and graduate school. And then it was a career as a teacher, which meant that I was back in high school for the next 34 years.

So, for a person like me, the clock ticks differently than it does for other people.

Some folks mark New Year’s Eve as the ending of the year. Others take note of the first snowfall to sigh over seasons passed.

But for me — and for all eternal students like me — the end of summer is the true end of the year, and that comes in August, as the cicadas start chirring in the trees. As a kid, we called them “back-to-school bugs,” and I still think of them that way.

And even though I’m now retired from teaching and I can choose any beginning and ending that I want, I can’t get it out of my head that it’s August already, the back-to-school bugs are clearing their throats, and the world is closing in on yet another ending.

August was a dreadful time when I was a kid, because it forced you to take stock of your summer and to realize all the opportunities you had let slip by. School was only weeks away, and now it was probably too late to learn to juggle, build a tree-house, or catch a raccoon and teach him tricks.

That’s why all of our hijinks got a bit more desperate in August. We would take risks in August that we would never take in June. You don’t want to spend all of your summer months with a cast on your arm or a patch over your eye, because it would put a crimp in your swimming or your BB-gun shooting. But a patch, or a cast, or even a neck brace could be an asset once school rolled around. It might even get you out of PE class until the gym cooled off a bit.

So in August, with school breathing down your neck, you could afford to take your pranks out on a limb — sometimes literally.

I don’t remember what stupid escapade I begged Mom to let me do with my friend Larry, but I remember that it was stupid enough for her to say, “If Larry wanted to jump off the roof, would you?”

And that was the end of that, though not for the reasons that Mom wanted.

“Hey, Larry,” I said, breathless after running to his house, “let’s jump off the roof!”

After all, it was August and there wasn’t much summer left. I felt like an idiot that I had let most of the summer slip by without jumping off the roof even once. We had spent evenings up there watching lightning flicker on the horizon. We had crept up in the early dawn to listen to alarm clocks rouse adults to their workaday world.

But jump? Leave it to Mom to put a notion like that into my head.

It was easy to get up to the roof from my back porch without a ladder. If you climbed the stairs and stood on the railing, you could use the top of the open screen door to step onto the roof.

The only problem was that, by the time Larry and I got to my back porch, word had leaked out that there was some serious roof-jumping to do, and a crowd had gathered to join us.

One of the guys in the crowd was Joe Palazzolo, who was a year or two older and a much better athlete. He insisted that he go first. We agreed, because we couldn’t have stopped him in any case.

And so Joe climbed up on the roof, turned his back to the yard, and did a perfect back-flip onto the lawn. He stuck the landing, without even a step backward.

Mom heard our cheering, and she dashed out into the yard to give us all a good scolding. She sent the others home, and then she yanked me inside with all the force she would have used if I had been the one to jump off the roof.

Summer ended that year with no casts, eye patches, or neck braces, and within weeks I was sweating in a steamy gym, dreaming already of next June and July, when I would surely be juggling in a tree-house as my trained raccoon turned somersaults.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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