No more back to school

For the first time in 19 years I don't have someone going back to school.

In that regard I can regard the current "Back to School" advertising as being even more annoying than usual.

But I can't help but let there be a wisp of nostalgia about it.

There was always something fresh about the prospect of another academic year, even as my daughter Elizabeth and son David progressed through college. There was still the talk of the courses they were going to take, the books and supplies they needed to buy, the living arrangement details they needed to finalize.

Now, in addition to being an Empty Nester, I'm a Unschooled Parent (in more ways than one, some might argue).

Elizabeth is happily at work as a doctor of physical therapy in Connecticut after what seemed like years and years and years of back to schools.

David is a May graduate of Boston College, and he is now engaged in the job of finding a job.

It may indeed be back to school some day for him, but as of this academic year I can ignore the ebbing tide of summer to thoughts of school.

This will make me want to hold onto summer for as long as I can, especially since here in northern New England there wasn't much of a summer through all of June and a good portion of July.

Somebody somewhere owes me more summer. I expect payment in August and, quite frankly, through all of September.

With a fall school season I can ignore, I can give myself the gift of the Endless Summer, with a nod to the 1966 movie of the same name. It's having the attitude of always being on on vacation from readin', writin' and 'rithmetic. It's scoping out surf gear instead of scoping out back to school sales.

I can be the beach bum I always wanted to be, worrying more about how glassy or choppy or big the surf will be rather than worrying about the best rate on tuition loans.

But the Endless Summer -- as it has always been -- is a fantasy.

There's the small matter of winter around here.

And even with no back to school, there's still plenty of readin', writin' and 'rithmetic to do.

Give the peace of summer a chance

One of my pet peeves is the marketing of holidays. Each year, it seems, advertisers start to trump a particular holiday earlier and earlier in order to spur sales. Last year, for example, we hadn't even gotten to Halloween when the advertising promotions for Christmas started. Now it's back to school that's getting me riled.

I know back to school isn't a holiday, but it's a significant seasonal event like Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas; it's an event that makes us sit up and take notice. The thing about back to school is that parents of students should sit up and take notice in August, as the month starts to nudge toward Labor Day. But we were barely beyond the Fourth of July when I noticed advertising inserts in my newspaper that were keyed to back-to-school sales. This drives me nuts.

In the same way that we have a biological clock, we also have a seasonal clock tied to the things that happen during the spring, summer, winter and fall. The rhythm of the seasons is important in the transition from one equinox to the other, especially for those of us in New England where the seasons can be so extreme from one to the other. Come Labor Day we can start the transition toward fall but not before. I'll accept Thanksgiving as the transition point to the Christmas season, but I don't accept Halloween as that transition point. Nor do I accept July 4 as the transition point from summer to back to school.

This must have caught the attention of the smart people at the Wall Street Journal who on Monday wrote a story about the earlier back-to-school advertising. According to the Journal story, back to school is the retailers' second-biggest selling period behind Christmas. And this year is especially important because consumers, battered by high gas prices and a jittery economy, aren't in much of a spending mood.

The Journal estimated spending for back-to-school and college related merchandise will be flat to slightly lower this year compared to last year, which saw a slight uptick in spending in large part because of must-have electronic items such as cell phones and music players. There isn't a must-have item this year, according to the Journal story. In an effort to distinguish themselves from a discount retailer such as Wal-Mart, said to the Journal, major retail chains have created marketing campaigns to attract the attention of consumers. Kohl's, for example, is launching a back-to-school clothes and accessories line from singer Avril Lavigne.

The whole thing strikes me as back-to-school chaos. I don't have back-to-school kids who I have to worry about any more. My son David, who'll be a college senior, is low maintenance when it comes time to start classes again. But you can see the change in pace and attitude in the general population when the time comes to go back to school. There's no need to hurry that along. We need to invite less stress, not more stress into our lives and summer is the time to concentrate on less stress.

Everything is relative, of course. Summers are not as stress free as I remember them. We're buffeted by the turbulence of uncertainty about our jobs, the economy, climate change, our children's future, our future. But we should be able to use summer to ratchet down the apprehension. Summer should allow us to melt stress as quickly as ice cubes in iced tea on a 90-degree day. We should be able to sit on the ocean beach or the lake shore and read a book that takes us away from the here and now. We should be able to hike and bike, canoe and kayak, sun and surf, relax and rejuvenate under the glare of the sun, not the glare of desperate merchandisers.

They only fuel the anxiety at a time when our tank of anxiety should be allowed to run empty.