Tricks of time

When you’re a kid, does the calendar ever move more slowly than it does in May?
Especially, that last two weeks of the month, when you’re still consigned to a classroom. You’re hot, sticky, and bored. The sun is shining, and you’re stuck inside.
In the heat, the varnish on your desk starts to give off a bit of a smell.
So does the “cloakroom,” that catch-all closet at the back of the classroom where you might find the poster board from your science project — and maybe someone’s experiment on growing mold on cottage cheese — on the last day of school.
The classroom clock ticks louder now, like a hammer on a nail.
The teacher, though he or she won’t admit it, is just about as bored as you are. Maybe more.
If it’s a history lesson, it’s especially painful for all concerned.
After all, the year is almost over and you’re just beginning to understand World War II. The Korean War, the Cold War, and Vietnam suddenly are reduced to a few paragraphs.
As to more recent — and in many ways more complicated — conflicts like the first Gulf War, the intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, they might get a nod during the last week.
But by then, your head is somewhere else entirely.
You are swimming. Maybe at the town pool. Maybe at your uncle’s pond. Maybe at the lakes up by Angola, where everything seems much more sophisticated and exotic and kids drink things like Dr. Pepper — even though it tastes like medicine — instead of normal things like Coke.
Or maybe you are playing ball. Maybe not a real game with real uniforms. Instead, maybe a game of pop-out-flies. The batter tosses up the ball, hits it out to a group of scraggly fielders. You keep score this way: $1 for a caught fly ball, 50 cents for a ball caught on the first bounce, 25 cents for a grounder. First kid to a dollar takes the place of the batter.
Or maybe — instead of that stifling classroom — your mind is on camping out. You’re with your big brother, and you’re using an old World War II canvas pup tent, the kind that leaks in the rain when you are stupid enough to touch it.
As you struggle to fall asleep in your musty sleeping bag that hasn’t been used since last year’s backyard campout, your brother teaches you the words to songs like “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” or “Three Jolly Coachmen,” or “The Man Who Never Returned.” Or maybe newer songs than those Kingston Trio hits from my own childhood.
And then the clock ticks.
How can it possibly move so slowly?
All those daydreams have flown by and only two minutes have passed?
How can that be possible?
And that’s when you figure it out: The clock and the calendar are in cahoots.
They conspire to move like molasses during the final days of the school year.
And it won’t be the last time they conspire.
They’ll do it all over again when you get older.
But that time, they won’t be slowing down.
They’ll be speeding up.[[In-content Ad]]