ELEGY FOR A SCHOOL YEAR

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/06/end-of-2012-school-year.html



The daylilies are out, pouting, just in time for the last day of school. A boy dragging a backpack runs a hand along the top of a wooden fence, the rail a racetrack, his hand the racecar. He stops to inspect morning glories—purple, fleshy, wet—and then holds up his hand: crawling over his skin, three tiny green bugs await their fate. “Aphids,” he says. “Because of the rain.” He smiles. He is missing a tooth.

The first graders at our neighborhood public school have been studying insects. He likes inchworms best. He finds aphids unworthy. (“They’re mean.”) But summer can make a boy woozy with possibility, and even mercy. He nudges the bugs from his finger to a flower and wipes his hand on his pants. Amnesty.

There will be breakfasts, in classrooms, for families. In the first grader’s room, twenty-one children will eat forty-two hard-boiled eggs, two watermelon, six pints of strawberries, and three dozen donuts, trucked in by parents on their way to work. There will be orange juice on the table next to the ant farm, between the butterfly tent and the terrarium for Franklin, a Russian tortoise who has been known to escape to the rug in the reading corner. There won’t be enough coffee for the grownups, but no one will mind.

After school, there will be an end-of-year party for the older kids: pizza, ice cream. Fifth graders will sing karaoke, but the only CD will be Adele, and, at this, the seventh graders will smirk.


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