Sheesh. It’s only the beginning of August, and retailers everywhere want the world to be thinking about back to school.
Come on. If I was a kid, I’d be inclined to be saying: Wait a minute! The summer’s only halfway through! I still have time to work in 12 lemonade stands, 17 games of kick the can, 24 double-scoop ice cream cones and 49 runs through the sprinkler!
Forget the backpacks, the binders and the pencil crayons, already. Yet the flyers want parents everywhere to get back into sitting-behind-the-desk mode, and they’ve been pushing that since, well, almost the day after the schools were closed in June.
Talk about a summer buzzkill.
When I had school-aged kids at home — and yes, that was a while ago — I was not inclined to take them for their back-to-school haircuts right around now. I was not about to take them to get their back-to-school runners.
For one thing, their hair would have been shaggy by the day after Labour Day. And the last thing they would have wanted to put on their feet were shoes.
The kids were running barefoot, as they would have been for weeks. A new pencil case? They’d have no use for that at the beginning of August — unless it was to store their pretty shells and pebbles from the beach.
A new lunch kit? Not at all necessary, not when you’re throwing open the refrigerator door, grabbing a handful of cherries and a glass of lemonade and calling that lunch.
Still, the retailers try, just as they’ll try to have us thinking about mistletoe and candy canes before the beginning of October.
Buy your glue sticks, they’re saying. Get your exercise books and your pencils and erasers.
All that can wait. The kids of summer have better things to do than decide whether next year’s binders will be blue or yellow or green.
There are balls still to bat. There are games of hide and seek to be played and water parks to be explored and marshmallows to be roasted.
There are sleepovers to be had and forts to be built and trees to be climbed.
The science fairs and the socials projects?
They’ll have their day, but not quite yet. Half of summer may be gone, but half of it’s to come.
