By Rick Kaempfer
Back to school.
I started dreaming about this day on the second day of summer vacation. The first day it was kind of nice to have all three boys at home with me for the entire day.
The second day, not so much.
That’s when the “back to school” dreams started for me. It happened nearly every day. I would drift off into a peaceful daydream about how it used to be. Ah, six hours of no kids in the house. Ah, six hours of blissful silence so I can get some work done. Ah, six hours of . . .
That’s as far as the daydream would go. At that point I would get interrupted by some sort of squeal, scream, crash or wail. “Whoever made that noise better start running,” I would say. “Or it’s hammer time.”
My oldest boy, the preteen, would look at my hand, defiantly unafraid. “You don’t have a hammer.”
“Not yet,” I’d threaten.
“What if you did have a hammer?”
Little did he know I had been waiting for someone to ask me that question since 1968. “If I had a hammer,” I answered, “I’d hammer in the morning. I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land. I’d hammer out justice. I’d hammer out freedom. I’d hammer out love between your brother and your other brother . . . all over this land.”
He never asked again.
But as much as I was looking forward to the first day of school, I began to notice in the middle of summer that there was one person in my house looking forward to it even more than me: my five-year-old son, Sean. This year all the “kids’ stuff” of preschool would be done forever. This year he would be going to real school (kindergarten!), and he honestly couldn’t wait. The excitement and anticipation were too much for him to handle.
I got the same question every day: “How many days until school starts?”
“Why are you so excited about school?” I asked him.
He looked at me like that was the dumbest question of all time. “Because I want to learn,” he said. The “duh” in his eyes added an exclamation point.
Wow. A child that actually can’t wait to learn! I was very proud of him. I’m not a big kid-bragger, but I couldn’t help myself. I began to tell everyone I knew about my eager-to-learn child.
People would ask him a question like, “What do you want to learn?” and he would up the ante by being even more prototypically scholarly: “I want to learn how to read. It’s my dream.” (He really said that.)
I was really beginning to puff out my chest until someone dug a little deeper into Sean’s desire to read. “After you learn how to read, what will you read first?” one aunt asked him.
That was the magic question. His face lit up with excitement. “The video game instructions!” he screamed.
Sigh.
Oh, well. At least he’s actually excited about school. We still have that in common.
