Sarah, my youngest daughter, is seen here at age 11. We’re in the depths of school summer holidays, 2010. It’s that time in August
when there’s still a few weeks of holiday left, but it’s getting hard to deny that it’s coming to an end. The TV advertisers aren’t helping.
Every five minutes, there’s a commercial featuring some deliriously happy parent dragging his or her kids around a store and shopping
for back to school supplies. Humorous in June perhaps, but too close to home in mid-August.
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This time of year has a very particular feel for all school-age children. The novelty of two months of summer holiday has worn off.
Now, there’s a sense of boredom and a definite waning of enthusiasm. Kids who couldn’t sleep past 7 a.m. in the first week after school
let out, now have to be jostled out of bed at 10 a.m.
.
But the unique quality of this time, makes it possible for an afternoon to disappear, by just hanging from a tire swing. Almost like some
kind of new, undefined Einsteinian time shift. Let’s give it a name – how about “The Mid-August Adolescent Time-Space Rift.” The
phenomenon that each day’s perception of the length of time it takes for an hour to pass becomes slightly less relative to yesterday
and the day before, until the last day before school, which flashes by in a nearly imperceptible instant.
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Enjoy it, kid. Those days are few and far between. As adults, many of us spend much of our lives (and large sums of money) trying to
recapture that lazy, slightly bored, nothing to do, time warp kinda feeling. I believe it’s known as “RELAXING,” but I have yet to recapture
that specific feeling.   Mark Heine