On The Silly Side by Jimmy Del Ponte

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From Dilboy Stadium that kisses the Arlington line all the way down to lower Broadway near Charlestown there is something in the air. The feeling in the ‘Ville is different. It appears every year around this time. It’s not the soupy, muggy humidity that I am talking about, it’s the impending start of…school.

How could this have happened? Wasn’t it just yesterday that we parents were looking forward to a break in making snacks, doing laundry, and fighting with the kids to go to bed? We were to be spared from finding parking spaces at school, making sure homework was done, and overseeing science projects, while trying to get our lazy kids out of bed.

Then like a ton of bricks it happens. The middle of August. It really creeps up on us gradually with a few Sunday newspaper circulars and a TV commercial peppered in between our favorite shows. It feels like we just got excited about summer vacation and now the countdown is in sight. Boo.

I’m not sad just for my own kids, and the fact that my little hiatus from parental school duties is over. I still have those back to school blues from when I was a kid. It affects me profoundly, even though today’s schools are nothing like the mini-prisons we had 40 years ago. I just can’t shake that dreadful feeling that overtook us as our summer vacation was drawing to a close.

It was time to go clothes shopping with mom, which was a nightmare. I always ended up with the exact opposite of what I wanted to wear. Mom always found the baggiest, itchiest, and dumbest looking pants in the store. Anderson Little in Medford was the scene of some of these bad memories. We did a lot of back to school shopping at places like Robert Hall, JM Fields, Zayres, and later on Bradlees. It was Thom McCann for shoes. I wore “desert boots” and those beige suede bucks with the pinkish soles for years. The trip into Jordan Marsh was grueling. I had to try on hundreds of pairs of goofy pants. I’m not sure when it happened, but eventually my parents just gave up and let me dress like I wanted.

To make matters worse, for eight years I had to endure the belittling, ridiculously strict, abusive conditions of parochial school. Thank God I finally escaped and attended the Western Junior High School for grade 9. It wasn’t exactly a free for all there either. Boys couldn’t have hair touching their collar, shirts had to be buttoned at all times and we had to walk in single file in the corridors. Anything was better than sister school. Coming from a Catholic school, and being short, I encountered a real life, aged in the wool bully, who made my life miserable. His reign of terror ended when we hit the High School and I started hanging around with some really big kids.

I will help my sons try to get every last drop of fun out of what is left of their summer vacation. I am sure they will not go to bed before at least 3 a.m. for the remainder of the summer. I wish we could find a way to slow down the fun times and speed up the bummer stuff. That would be a dream come true.

I am not looking forward to the last minute clothes shopping. And what the heck happens to all those glue sticks, erasers and scissors we buy every year? I think my sons may have completed a few pages in ONE of their required reading list books, maybe. I hope at least one of the boys can still wear last year’s pants (I may have to let out a hem or two).

I remember the first day of school, sophomore year at Somerville High when I was stopped by a BUILDING MASTER! He said I smelled like smoke and asked if I had smoked a cigarette. I said no, and informed him that the smell of smoke was coming from the pants my mother had just bought for me from the Bargain Center in Davis Square. They sold discontinued, water logged and smoke damaged merchandise. Good comeback, huh?