Every year, late in the summer, an elephant enters the room for schoolkids. It’s a dreaded time when your summer is fading from view, being slowly eclipsed by the realization of the approach of another school year. For a kid, it is like watching your ice cream cone in slow motion fall on the hot pavement and melt away. Leagues are starting to dry up. Swim team is over. Yet summer is still here, hanging on until the last dog dies. It’s a hard time for kids. They are bored, retreating inside, sulking, but unable to speed up their inevitable pain and start the dang school year already.
I’m glad my parents did not try to bail me out of those moments of boredom with a last-ditch field trip to Pidgeon Creek, or with home movies of us as children running around in diapers. Either would have robbed my imagination of those moments where I had to get inventive and figure out what to do with my last few free moments before new spelling lists, times tables and the history of Colonial America consumed my waking hours.
I was in such a state late one summer, when in a fit of utter flatness, lethargy and discontentment, I decided to find out for myself whether the softer earth in the middle of my neighbor’s back yard was really there because of a giant air bubble rumored to be just under the surface. Twin brothers George and Wally Rickles had even backed up their claim by showing me how they could jump up and down on that spot with hardly any effort at all, as if the buried bubble just underneath them was propelling them upward.
“But if you take a shovel and dig down,” George pointed out, “and you hit that bubble, it’ll burst…”
“Yea, it’ll burst alright,” chimed in Wally, who was born 13 seconds after George and prone to repeating what his brother said.
“…and you’ll be spit right out into interstellar space. It’ll be like a volcano.”
…just like a volcano on TV,” piped in Wally, right on cue.
At the time, having watched all 75 episodes of the Jetsons a dozen times, I was quite familiar with interstellar space, and although I didn’t like the way the Jetson’s dog Astro ate metal scrapes, I was all in with the possibilities of a cosmic lifestyle.
One lunar rotation after my conversation with the Rickles twins, I climbed over the fence and borrowed my neighbor’s shovel. She was a gardener and left all her tools readily available throughout her yard, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, except for the two days when they all were carted off to be sharpened by an ancient-looking man in overalls who walked bent over up her driveway to gather them and then took about an hour to carry them back to his truck before he drove off. I offered to help him one year, but he threatened to turn me into a scarecrow, so I let well enough alone and went off to find my subterranean yard-bubble.
Once there, I furiously began to dig deeper and deeper, like a boss, pausing and waiting between jabs for the impending explosion I knew would jettison me over the neighborhood.
Since I was destined to fly into outer space, what would it matter if I went down a few more feet before blast off?
However, in my digging exuberance, I failed to notice Ancient Tool Man approaching, having come to claim the shovel I had “borrowed” from next door. This year, as an added attraction, he had brought his dog, a behemoth of a creature, who, coincidentally, was only let out of its cage at the local zoo once a year. (Reference: The Hounds of the Baskervilles).
It was then, as the rabid hound came bearing down on me, that going back to school didn’t seem all that bad, where observing how paramecium divide or learning how cambion is formed in a tree, in fact, looked absolutely thrilling.
I had only a second to pop my head up, jump up and make a run for it, until I noticed my neighbor, whose yard I had excavated without permission, suddenly appear in front of me moving at break-neck speed on his brand new three-speed Toro lawn mower. If it weren’t for the possibility of being decapitated, I might have done some early research for school regarding the underside of a lawnmower and all its movable parts. Instead I ducked down into my man hole and prayed the bubble wouldn’t release itself as the mower passed over me.
As both the maniac dog, Ancient Man and Toro descended on me…
PS. The end of this muse will be continued next week, as the end of summer, and the possibility of a radical new haircut for me come into full view. By the way, I might just stop here and mention that if you have bored kids and they are outside right now, you might take a gander out your window and check on them…