Phthursday Musings: School's Out

Back in 2017, we’d pretty much decided we were going to move before it was time for kindergarten. I had the idea that I really wanted us to find a dual language program, a requirement that significantly limited our options. At the time Michelle was working at a clinic in Des Plaines, so we only looked up to a certain distance away from there.

There were some options. There were dual language schools in Evanston and Barrington and Schaumburg and Elmhurst and Skokie. I’m not really remembering what the knocks were on some of them. But one day we went to the zoo and checked out the town and that very day we both felt good about it.

We moved to Brookfield in April 2019, four months before kindergarten started. As the big day neared, somebody got their hands on a pair of scissors, which meant that this child’s shortest ever haircut came just in time for his very first day of school.

A couple weeks in he told us that he made a friend. It was less like he was super excited than it was like it was super important information. It’s been almost seven years now and they’re still buddies, and we’re still waiting for the day when he actually remembers to give us important information again.

Today, impossibly, was his last day at Congress Park. As I’m writing now, the newly promoted junior high students are at a class party, for which we understand the girls have gotten all dressed up while the boys had to be reminded there was a party at all.

Our district is one of the few which still has sixth graders in the grade school. That will actually change in two years to the much more common K-5 approach. But for me, it seemed very familiar, because we had been K-6 back when I was in school 183 years ago.

The transition was different for me, because I knew I’d not just be leaving King but leaving the school district altogether. There are numerous people who I spent seven years going to school with, and who I just suddenly, as of that one day, have never seen again.

That’s not the case now though. Their cohort has kept remarkably intact and they’re all going to trundle off to the junior high together. They’ll meet new friends in their two years there and then go off to the huge high school where they can join the Romanian Fencing Club or whatever on earth they want to do.

There have been some head-scratching things over all this time, like how unhelpful the report cards are and how difficult my weird two years as PTO president were. But when it comes to what really counts, we made an unbelievably excellent decision moving here, because this is a great group of friends which I expect he’ll have forever, and in this insane world, what truly is more important than that?

It’s kind of silly sounding but what I’m hoping for over the next few years is that our house can be a place where all these doofuses come and go as they please. I want them to always feel welcome here. What I don’t want is them to all just hole up in front of their computers and not actually be out and about with each other. But come on over, get on the old NES, play Super Tecmo Bowl, run wild with QB EAGLES, that’s what I want to see.

Over the last six weeks, I’ve been on three work trips. Over the last two weeks I’ve been to three ball games at three different stadiums and three concerts at three different venues. I actually have a lot I could reflect upon, but I’ve been so otherwise busy that I haven’t really stopped and mused.

This busy period has coincided with this great wind down of grade school and I find I’m just exhausted. And yet I find that everyone else is too. The social / political moment seems to have evolved to a different plane of fatigue. These sixth graders, any time I saw them (excluding the dreaded 8:15 Saturday morning soccer matches), they’ve seemed to be in this state of incoherent nervous energy. You know if you take a pen or a pencil, and you hold it in the middle, and you wobble it up and down just so, it looks like you’re bending it, but you know you’re really not, it’s just an optical illusion? These kids all have this quality to them like it looks like there’s something amiss, like they’re all a-wobble, but it’s not really them, it’s us. They get older and we think we relate to them more than ever and yet we actually relate to them less than ever in a lot of ways.

One thing that occurs to me is this. My own parents, when I started kindergarten, were aged X & Y respectively, right? And when I finished sixth grade, they were, essentially, X+7 and Y+7. The things they went through from X through X+7 and from Y through Y+7… and I compare that to myself, and throughout these entire 7 years, we’ve lived in the same house and I’ve had the same job where I work from home, and so I know this makes my perspective different, but I don’t know how to even characterize that. I don’t know if I’m impressed with myself for having settled into something so positive or if I’m dumbfounded as to how much the same things seem to be even though the world is changing so much.

Your Phthursday flag, related to absolutely nothing, is that of North Macedonia:

The design is derivative of, without being quite the same as, what it replaced, the Kutlesh flag, based on the Vergina Sun:

The adoption of the Kutlesh flag at the time of Macedonian independence in 1992 apparently really pissed off the Greeks who went so far as to impose a boycott on their neighbors over their flag. I can’t do justice to the entire controversy here, so I’ll direct you to the Wikipedia page for Vergina Sun.

The idea that there is a North Macedonia implies the idea that there is some southern aspect of Macedonia and boy howdy can that send us down a 2500 year old rabbit hole. The best way I can explain this is that over the course of two and a half millennia, some things change a lot, and other things change not quite so much. People come and go, except some people persist and persist and persist.

I’ve done enough genealogical research that I can tell you I’ve rarely come across lines of the family where three consecutive generations were born in the same general place. All of these Youngs and Pickenses and Biermanns and so forths seemed to just keep on moving. That’s just how it was. And how it is.

But that’s not how it is for everyone. When we were living in Chicago, I’d encounter people who would talk about being fifth generation Jefferson Parkers. That sort of thing carries with it a fundamentally different mentality, one which I expect would be a certain flavor of conservative. And stop and really think about that: how many of the houses that you lived in were 100 years old at the time you lived in them? What about your grandparents?

Now translate all of that to the idea that there’s a big piece of land - a country, verily - where once upon a time there was a tiny kingdom, which rather suddenly turned into the mightiest kingdom on the planet - and those people were all of a particular ethnicity, but now the people who live in that big piece of land are mostly of a different ethnicity, and yet they live next door to the inheritors of that original ethnicity. When you have a situation like that, why, that’s when people start going to battle over whether or not to put in bike lanes up Milwaukee Avenue, isn’t it?

What’s interesting to me in the wake of all of this though is that North Macedonia, which might well be the most anonymous country on the entire continent, wound up with what might be the most visually striking flag. It does not at first evoke the idea of Europe, does it? In part this might be because of the imperial Japanese flag, but I think more so, it is a flag of the sun, and when I think hot bright country my mind tends to veer closer to the equator than the Balkans.

To me as a symbol it manages to evoke something ancient and also something strikingly modern, and I wonder if that’s how the North Macedonians think about it.

Come to think of it, that’s kind of how I feel today. Ancient and modern, all in one.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to catch up on some other things I’d been hoping to write about. I’ve had a hard time writing recently though. Also a hard time reading. My balance is a little off. At times in the past I’ve used META-SPIEL as a way to restore balance. But balance requires focus and my focus has really been shot. And the end of the school year is part of all of this.

I think it will be a very interesting summer. It was definitely an interesting time for me when I was 12. I think I was more happy than ever and less happy than ever? There was so much to do and so little to do. Just like now, except not at all.