Column: Tales from Exit 22

Storm clouds loomed on the horizon.

Green tomatoes.

Summer had a case of the dwindles. People had begun worrying about green tomatoes. Would they have time to ripen? If not, what would they do with them? They knew what to do with kids. They sent them to school.

School was coming at a gallop.

Summer brought relief from a life that found me either in school, on the way to or from school, or preparing for school. Summer was a world covered in gravy.

There would be no more escapades like Larry Holland hitting fly balls to me as I stood on top of the henhouse with my Andy Pafko autographed model baseball glove. I was fielder on the roof.

It was time for back-to-school sales and attitude adjustments. I had no use for a vuvuzela as my mother selected turtleneck sweaters that would strangle me slowly. School was approaching like a grizzly bear with a toothache. The average boy wanted only one thing out of school—himself. If asked, “How do you like school?” A boy tended to answer, “Closed.”

I had studied all summer. I studied baseball cards, box scores (even those of the minor leagues) in The Sporting News, Steinbeck novels and Updike stories. I figured batting averages in my head and wondered aloud why runs batted in weren’t abbreviated as RsBI instead of RBIs. I tried to understand the cynicism of Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” My imaginary friend had started playing with the man who lived on the next place. My imaginary friend looked like Paladin would look had he been a kid my age. A kid my age with a moustache. He deserted me before I could desert him for school.

School! My brain hadn’t downloaded the proper apps yet. I needed saving by a Saint Bernard with a keg of Tang around its neck. Tang, because that’s what the astronauts drank.

Mom eagerly awaited the start of school. Dad breathed a sigh of relief as he ate his gravel nuts for breakfast. I was accustomed to getting “the look” from my parents. Now I’d be getting “the look” from teachers, coaches, bus drivers and lunch ladies.

I’d been sitting in the catbird seat. Now I’d be tossed amid the teeming throngs on their way back to school. I wanted to run away in a serpentine manner.

I enjoyed staying up late reading books. I drained flashlight batteries at a great rate as I read in bed. This caused me to fall asleep in the barn and at the breakfast table. Now life would become even more time-sensitive. I’d have to include a bus in my sleeping sites. I hoped I wouldn’t have to sit with Saturated Matt. He’d been held back a couple of years and, while he was a good guy, he took up an entire bus seat that was too crowded to begin with. He was the only kid I’d ever known who had been redshirted by the school lunch program.

School was like golf. There would be days when I lost ground on each swing. School was a needy friend. It needed this and it needed that.

“What would you do if the Hartland school was destroyed by a tornado?” I’d ask.

“I’d send you to Bucksnort,” my mother replied.

“What if that school was hit by a tornado, too?”

“Then you’d go to Knockemstiff.”

“What if Knockemstiff was also demolished by a tornado?”

“Where are you getting all these tornadoes?” she asked.

“The same place you’re getting all those schools.”

It wasn’t that I disliked school. It was that I loved summer so much. Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” He could have been talking about school. In hindsight, even the bad times were good.

Watching a ceiling

Years ago, my mother had cataract surgery, a procedure in those days that necessitated a hospital stay. After the surgery, mother had to lie motionless on a hospital bed for at least 48 hours. A pillowed brick was placed on each side of her head to keep her still. She listened to the radio as she stared at the ceiling of her room.

I visited as she lie unmoving on the bed. I intended on reading the newspaper and several chapters of a book to her. I asked her how she was doing.

She replied, “Things are looking up.”

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.