First day of school

Today is the first day of school for public schools in our town.

I worked for the school district for 32 ½ years. I also attended school in that district, so subtracting a couple of years when I attended elementary school in another state, and not counting the years I went to art school and college it’s about…errrr….let me get out my calculator…forty years. Add in those other starts and it’s more like forty-six first days.

Whew. That’s a lot of first days of school. Of course the advantage of the 32 ½ years I worked for the school district I didn’t have to attend classes. But oddly enough that feeling of the first day never truly went away; just thinking about the butterflies in my stomach from my student days gave me butterflies during my working days.

When I saw the kids on their first days in school I had empathy for them. I don’t think as a student I was ever happy on the first day of school. Excited yes, happy no. But some first days were filled with more dread than others. It depended on what I had built up in my head as summer came to a close. Remembering those days brings on memories that provide strong internal reactions.

We can recover from accidents and illnesses, but we never recover from our childhoods, do we?