Now with the fair week behind us, the wild fire of youth is soon to be extinguished.

Tuesday, August 17, 1999

Now with the fair week behind us, the wild fire of youth is soon to be extinguished. If you belong to the young at heart this means one of two things: 1. School begins in two weeks and you can hardly wait – you are so excited; or 2. School begins in two weeks and you are becoming depressed.

There are probably some who fall somewhere in between, but for most it’s either the excitement, the anticipation side, or the other – the yuck side.

The ‘yuck’ side has not been concerned all summer with the proper spelling of any word or the need to know, nor have they had any spelling tests, or reading tests or math tests. Maybe, if they have access to a computer they may have written to a friend and in doing so used the "spellcheck" to see if they were on the right track. He or she may have written home from camp but that’s highly doubtful. There, at camp, they prefer to receive letters. For sure, if they did write anything this summer, they didn’t underline the subject once and the predicate twice nor is there a soul among them who misses diagraming sentences.

Many have forgotten what nine times seven equals. They know it’s somewhere between 58 and 67. Can they still name the 50 states correctly? They might know where they can get their hands on 50 worms which, to them, is often more important.

Growing up along the Turtle Creek helped us "river rats" in our neighborhood gain a deep contempt for school, especially when it interrupted our impromptu baseball or our fighting of wars up and down the shorelines of the creek, extending into the interior of the woods, past Feeley’s up to Clay Hill. In the woods south of the house our "Foxhole" was strategically situated known only to us and the dog.

And what school reading assignment or spelling test could stand up to rafting up and down the river; some rafts even floated. Our best vessel, about 2 feet in width and 10 feet long, was originally some kind of framing device used to build the new cement bridge designed to replace the old steel bridge.

Yes, the corps of engineers were going to change the course of the creek, straighten the road, and take out the old iron bridge that had been there forever like an old buddy, slowing down traffic that came speeding in from Austin Acres. This endeavor was about to alter the course of the Turtle Creek, spelling the beginning of the end to our river navigations but not before we changed the depth of the creek ourselves by hauling rock and damning the creek just upstream from the old bridge. After several days of collecting, stacking and restacking rocks we were able to raise the level enough to maneuver even our worst raft on the water. We finished the nights off by hunting night crawlers, playing kick-the-can or chasing fire flies.

Now, how can one compare this to using your spelling words in sentences or remembering to invert the fraction when you divide, or using "I before E except after C and sometimes Y," or worse yet sitting behind Judy Warmenen in Mr. Johnson’s fourth grade class at Shaw School – now the site of four homes with nothing in common.

Every time Mr. Johnson asked a question Judy’s hand shot straight up AND she was never wrong. She was always right. Besides that she had perfect posture making my "slouch" even more suspect. "Robert, will you please sit up straight."

And how humiliating to have the corrected papers passed back down the row from student to student – Judy taking her perfect paper with the star or 100 circled at the top revealing mine beneath it with a -7 or -9 written in red. She never said anything when she passed it back, but you knew what she was thinking.

My only excitement that year came on a nice spring day when I launched a paper airplane out our third floor window – a day we had a substitute for Mr. Johnson. It sailed forever it seemed, gliding out, circling back, until it finally landed at the foot of a teacher who had her class on the playground for P.E. The joy of this incredible flight was quickly replaced by fear as she glared in my direction as I ducked away from the open window. No doubt Miss Sorkel, the principal, would soon have me standing front and center in her office – with the airplane in her hand saying, "Recognize this?"

Yes, Winston Churchill was right when he said, "I was happy as a child with my toys in the nursery, I have been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey."

Bob Vilt’s column appears every other Tuesday