Recollections leave out the mundane - and the important

Erin Marsh Thinking of 'U'

When was the last time someone asked you to write an essay about your summer vacation?

In third or fourth grade, everybody had to write them - first-day back assignments. The fans whirred, and while Miss Dum-dee-dum, Mrs. La-di-da or Mr. So-and-so droned on about all things academic, you stared out the window and wished for just one more popsicle and one more day of freedom. There were lots of white sneakers and brown arms.

Back then, you stood up in front of a class that was one big squirming monster and read aloud: "On my summer vacation I took swimming lessons and piano lessons 'cuz my mom made me and I went to visit my aunt in New York. We drove there in our station wagon. It was hot and my sister was a brat." Everyone had stories to tell about camp, vacations, new toys, and sometimes a new brother or sister. Big events - it was all about big events. Lots of times the swimming lesson or the trip to visit Random Relative did not occupy the bulk of your summer hours, but it was the most easily retrievable memory.

So what did we actually do in between all of those major happenings? We probably ran through some sprinklers and made some trips to the ice cream man and did some whining about being hot and bored. We did all kinds of fun things that never made the essay cut because they didn't seem special enough. We could go to the lake or take bike rides anytime we wanted - what's the big deal? Why bother remembering those times?

The same phenomenon appears in high school yearbooks. Flip through the pages of yours. What do you see? Staged photos of proms and homecoming dances that show a pyramid of your classmates wearing big, toothy grins. Lots of senior portraits of your friends looking airbrushed and perfect. The pictorial chronology skims the surface of all things happy and wonderful, leaving you to wonder what became of everything that happened in between proms and football games. Didn't that count, too?

Like high school yearbooks, our what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation essays didn't reflect the events that really transpired. I wonder if our recollections now would include all of the things we excluded as kids. I think mine would. Think about all of the good, ordinary things you did this summer. I sat in a car with a terrific friend on a hot day and ate a big cherry Slurpee with one of those spoon-straws while an old Bruce Springsteen song played on the radio. Try it - remember the things that would escape the surface summary, but that gave you the best moments. Like playing whiffle ball, or falling asleep during a thunderstorm, or sharing a great kiss.

The first-day-back essay is one of those rites of passage to mark the beginning and the end of the cycles that matter in our lives, at this point. Some of the excitement tinged with dread we felt back then is the same we feel now. As all the TV and newspaper ads remind us, back-to-school time means new stuff! New notebooks and teachers and friends. You may not have a Smurfy new lunchbox this year, but you might have a new roommate, or a new apartment or dorm room. Shopping for a new Trapper Keeper and sneakers has been replaced by shopping for new towels, or a mini refrigerator, or a futon. Even if it's not your first year at college, the college-student-housewares-shopping ritual is evidence that we all seem to gravitate to new things to start off a new year.

Parents see us off to school with the same old mixture of pride and wistfulness (though by this point they might be a little more eager to send us along), and at some time we realize - maybe suddenly, maybe gradually - that we are less and less anxious about leaving home and more and more excited about getting out on our own.

Maybe this is your first first week of college. Maybe it's your last first week of college. They're both pretty important. It's all moving up, moving out, moving on. Regardless, we are faced with a wonderful phenomenon: a new school year! This year, some of us will just begin to discover the University, and some of us will try to hold on to the days that move by much too fast. The little things that were glossed over or forgotten in our elementary school accounts of life will become much more important.

Like the summer vacations that came and went like an ice cream cone in July, so will this year disappear. Many times during the coming semesters, we'll tell ourselves we're tired, we're overworked, we're sick of living on pizza and caffeine - but somewhere, we probably secretly love it. We'll start to include all the good, ordinary things in our mental Account of Life. Because - as we'll wish we knew when we enjoyed popsicle-and-Slip-'n'-Slide summers - the "in between" times matter the most.

- Erin Marsh can be reached over e-mail at eemarsh@umich.edu

09-08-97