In my neighborhood, the buses are rumbling by on practice runs for the start of the school year. In my youth, it was a bittersweet time of year. I enjoyed getting back into football pads and sweating out the two a days, but I missed the simplicity of just waking up, eating, working and sleeping. I wonder if kids today even go through those emotions. With the connected society, there is very little of the "haven't seen you since last spring". And, certainly, there isn't any of the "what did you do last summer?" No, those days are gone. I am positive that every marginally eventful minute is tweated to friends or posted to Facebook.
We often took "vacations from hell" with my parents in my very young days. Trips to Idaho, Yellowstone and the Washington coast are still vivid in my mind. Mostly, because of the driving my father felt was necessary to justify a vacation. Without major freeways, the trips usually took two days to and from those locations; long, hot (no air conditioning) sweaty days. So if we got 7-10 days of vacation, we inevitably spent 5-8 of those days driving. The pictures my father took were transposed to slides he shared with the neighbors in the fall, part of the annual tradition.
Anyway, all that has changed. There are no slides to share because all the pictures are online for anyone to see. There are no stories to tell the first day of school because you shared all of them at the very moment they happened with social networking technology. The trips are all time shortened by the advent of freeways criss crossing America. I think the summers seem a lot shorter any more; there are year round schools and year round football practices. The break in the routine for summer seems to have gone by the wayside. Maybe that is why it's hard today to get fired up about the first day of school.
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