Northwest Corner Days

I am a visual learner and continue to use the school calendar image for thinking about times and dates. You know the calendar setup: it’s two rows of months, September to February on top and March to August on the bottom; our parents had them in planners and wall calendars in the 1970s. To this day, it’s how I visualize dates, forever bound to Labor Day in place of New Year’s when it comes to marking an annual cycle.

The two-by-six month grid is a periodic table for time, grouping months and setting agendas. March is the beginning of the warmth series; spring is in the middle and summer is at the most exciteable end. Sepetember is the beginning; between school, Rosh HaShanah and my birthday, it’s how I’ve always marked time. But starting the mental year in September means Thanksgiving is square in your sights, the first milestone of the year, just 10 weeks after new books and teachers. That may explain my life-long fascination with the holiday. Winter holiday season is just past the mid point, but by looking down a row you know you’re exaclty halfway to the official start of the next summer. February is the mid point. I never thought to look below February and see August, summer smiling back at me but also the on-ramp to a new school year. There’s a comfortable reason that February is short – you’re eager to start the next group in the table.

Conversesly, it makes sense that July and August are tag-teamed months of 31 days. You don’t want them to end. It’s getting to the last pages of Tales from the Jersey Shore and Deep Tank Jersey. August 31 is a carriage return (if you ever used a typewriter) up and to the left. Back to the northwest corner, as my band director would say. The first page, the beginning, the best of times, the worst of times, and other allusions to formal education.

Here’s the deal: even without the visual calendar cue, you know it’s coming. The end of summer isn’t just ticking off those last few boxes, more scared of losing them than the last three squares of toilet paper in a public bathroom. When you wake up, you need a sweatshirt before the day gets warm and humid. You can smell fall in the air; it smells like leaves that are ready to hit the ground. You see cars laden with the accoutrements of a Long Beach Island summer driving off the majors into your neighborhood, some early immigrants back to reality. The seagulls lose their black feathers, going all white to match the weather. A friend once pointed this out to me, on the very last day of summer, motioning to a gull that was working the salt and pepper feathered look. She knew because she spent most of her life at the shore, for a few years even when school was in session, and yet she still had a mental last day of summer. The gulls mocked her loudly with their squawks and silently with a whiter shade of pale on their heads.

Growing up, any day that you could steal from the beginning of September was a huge win. You’d take one of those beckoning early September days and stuff it right back in your pocket. If you could break free of school clothes shopping or cleaning your room or band camp (before the days of summer reading lists) maybe you could sneak in a day in flip flops, or jury-rig the antenna on the living room FM receiver to pick up WJRZ from Ship Bottom, NJ, or play whatever board game you discovered that summer spread across the floor, completing a perfect hat trick of a summer recap. It was perfect, until you heard the gulls, chased inland from the shore by an approaching storm.