The Golden Chain of Reading: End of Summer

We are at the beach at the moment, then head back home and very shortly will be in the throes of preparing to return to school which seems to happen earlier every year. In Georgia there are school systems that now resume their fall schedule in July. Which sort of prompts the question, when does summer end and fall begin?

Sally fondly recalls when she was growing up in South Carolina, how school always started after Labor Day and she reacts almost with moral outrage at the ever advancing schedule of school. It didn't start earlier in her day in part because the schools were not air-conditioned but even September in South Carolina heat can be pretty brutal. She recollects one of those early childhood dilemmas that help train our thinking for later life decisions. Do you wait till the last possible moment before the bell goes before arriving at class thereby maximizing your socializing time (and anyone that knows Sally knows that that is a pretty important goal)? Or, alternatively, do you show up as early as possible and have a chance at getting a seat near the large fan lethargically pushing warm humid air around the room, or at least around the few kids seated near it?

There are many markers we can use for end of summer. When things stop growing and you start harvesting is, of course, an age old one. When school starts again has become kind of a traditional measure. The Autumnal Equinox is the astronomical measure, occurring this year on September 23 (at 09:51am). Some people even say summer has ended when commuter traffic patterns return to "normal".

Which is really to say that many things are what they are based on how we choose to see them. Years ago I had a vivid experience of just how powerful our preconceptions can be in interpreting the evidence around us. We were living in Stockholm, Sweden at that time but had been home to the US to visit family in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the late summer. We had had a full-on summer and were already pretty tired before embarking on our return journey. Flying back to Sweden was a fairly circuitous route at that time. I think we flew from Tulsa to Chicago and/or New York to London and then to Stockholm. We started out in the afternoon from Tulsa, made our various US connections, flew overnight and arrived in London in the early hours of the next day.

At that time my sister was in college in London, though she was away at some summer job when we passed through. We had decided in advance, though, to break up this marathon trip and rest and catch-up at her flat in London before proceeding on to Stockholm the next day. After processing through the ever crowded Immigration lines at Heathrow airport, we rented a car and drove into downtown London, dumped all our stuff at her flat, and had a quick light meal. We debated whether to try and take in some sights or go to a museum, but decided we were just too exhausted. So exhausted in fact, that we decided to turn in at about 3pm and get a full night's sleep, wake at 7am, pack up and head back out to the airport for the last leg of our journey, the noon flight to Stockholm.

And that's what we did. We set two or three clocks to our wake up time of 7am, and tumbled into beds, sofas, sleeping bags, where ever we could find space in her small apartment and slept solidly till the alarms went off. We woke, had showers, had breakfast and began to tidy up and pack up the few things we had taken out. We commented on how, when you are so, so tired, even a long sleep of sixteen hours could feel like just a brief snooze.

My job was to take all the suitcases out and pack them in the car. We had been awake a couple of hours at this point. My sister's apartment was in one of those old Edwardian apartment buildings, always fairly dark and grungy with little natural light filtering down to the ground floor apartment she had. Even so we noted how gray the day was.

I took a first load of incidental bags out to the car even before we had breakfast and mentioned on my return that it looked like in fact that it was more than an overcast day, there must be a storm system coming in because it was getting quite dark. Later after breakfast, I took the next load of luggage out and suggested we might want to check the weather forecast because it was really getting quite dark, and looked like there was going to be a big storm. Taking the last load out, I returned and reported that it was so cloudy and had gotten so dark that the street lamps had come on. We might want to check with the airport and see if the flights were being delayed or cancelled.

It was only at this point, having been awake two or three hours, that we twigged to the fact that something was just not quite right. How could there be such a big storm, so big and dark that street lamps were coming on? And then it occurred to me, could it possibly be that we were looking at nightfall rather than a new day? It was so firmly set in our minds that we needed to head to the airport to catch the plane that we couldn't allow the idea that in fact we were still half a day ahead of departure. Our senses told us one thing, our minds, with their unassailable assumptions, told us another. And how to resolve our predicament? There was nothing on the TV or radio that was giving us a clue. There was no internet.

I was sent out to find the answer. Showing what I think was a fair degree of resource for a twelve year old, I walked around the corner to the tube station, down the stairs and up to the man at the information booth. It was one of the more embarrassing conversations I have ever started. "I know this sounds silly but could you tell me, is it 10pm at night or 10am in the morning." Giving me a patient look that could only have been worn by someone having spent years answering stupid-tourist questions, he politely told me it was 10pm at night.

How could this have happened? Returning to the apartment, I realized the source of our problem was the mechanical, wind-up clocks - no digital clocks then. When we had turned in at 3pm and set the mechanical clocks for 7, we had failed in our exhausted and befuddled state, to recognize that the next 7 was at 7pm, not 7am the next morning. We had slept only four hours and then failed to recognize what should have been the so obvious signs of dusk for what they were.

After all the mental preparation for departure it was a little disconcerting to turn in once again.

So it is with the stories we highlight this week. Stories where it is our decision about what we expect or desire that actually then defines reality. It might be a story such as Summer of the Swans where, despite plenty of reasons to distrust one of the characters, Sarah Godfrey decides that she will set aside that well founded bias and in doing so opens up the door for a better outcome than she could have anticipated. That touchstone of American children's literature, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie is full of instances where the outcome is contingent on a conscious choice to see the positive side of a set of unalterable circumstances rather than the equally valid negative side. In Stuart Little, the Littles have to move beyond their expectations and decide that the fact that Stuart is a mouse rather than the boy they intended to adopt is incidental. In Hoot the children decide that they don't have to accept the development of the land and the destruction of the burrowing owls. And probably the most famous instance is in L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz when only after Dorothy points it out to them do the Cowardly Lion, the Tinman and the Scarecrow realize that they respectively are courageous, have a heart, and have a brain ("if I only had a brain").

Reality is reality and we can't change that, but we can change how we view it and how we respond to it. I am not advocating that we take a naïve Pollyanna-ish attitude and just see the positive, but I think it is a useful, and indeed a critical skill, when faced with circumstances we cannot directly change, to know that by our choice alone, we can choose to make the best of the situation and by doing so we can sometimes even change the outcome, as in Shiloh.

And that is when summer ends; not when school starts, not when the sun sits somewhere in space where the celestial equator intersects the ecliptic, not a date on the calendar. It ends when we let it end and move on to the next thing we focus on.

Picture Books