Chapter 5: The Best Thing About the Last Day of School
The best part about the last day of school isn't that the school year is over, it's that summer has started. This is a story about pranks, cold Stroh's beer , swimming pools, and the start of Summer.
This is Chapter Five of The Stories We Tell, a nostalgic lookback on friendship, growing up, and the hopes we have of becoming heroes.
It’s The Wonder Years meets The Sandlot with sprinklings of Friday Night Lights. New stories will be published weekly. For a list of all chapters, please visit the Chapter List here: Chapter List - The Stories We Tell.
June 2, 1993
The secretary at our school played cards with my grandma. Grandma liked Old Maid, the secretary preferred Gin Rummy, and they both liked to drink Manhattans and gossip. Plus, their husbands were friends who ran the town clambake each fall for their local Rotary Club, one year getting too far gone on Bloody Mary’s and beer they were snoring a symphony mixed of Mozart and Molson’s while the crowd wondered who forgot to cook the clams.
Every Thursday, the four of them got together for cocktails and card games. Grandma smoked cigarettes, too.
Two other things to know.
On the last day of school each year, the Secretary shared a farewell message over the PA. She thanked us for a fun year and wished everyone a safe summer. The message was her polite way to tell us kids to piss off for a few months and return to being our parents’ problems.
Grandma and Grandpa had a good-sized swimming pool in their backyard with a big shallow end and a deep end deep enough for a diving board. Just off the pool, they had a concrete patio with chairs and a picnic table with bench seats. Next to that, extending off their garage, was a covered porch where Grandpa liked to sit in the shade and sip cold beer. Not far off the patio were stairs leading to the basement where Grandpa kept a keg of Stroh’s on tap and had us make beer runs. Not a surprise, but I learned how to tilt a glass so the ratio of beer to foam leveled just right before I learned how to do fractions.
A week before the last day of school three years ago, Grandma, Grandpa, our school secretary, and her husband hatched a plan. Sitting around a small, wooden kitchen table with flaps winged out to fit all four of them and glasses on their second or third refilling, they decided to see if my sister and I ever paid attention to the end-of-year announcement.
In 1991, they made things obvious.
Minutes before the final bell released us for ten weeks of fun, the school Secretary said, “We wish everyone a wonderful summer. Remember to visit your grandparents, especially if they have a pool and could use a refill.”
I understood right away what this meant and sprinted to the pool before even heading home. That year, I was the first one into the water all summer.
By 1992, they got more creative.
The PA crackled before the Secretary spoke. “Thank you for another special school year.” She laughed, some, as the words left her mouth. “We wish you a safe summer full of family and long days in places where the taps never run dry. Like sand through the hourglass, these are the days of your lives.”
The only think Grandma loved more than Manhattans, cigarettes, and a good clarinet was spending an hour each day watching Days of Our Lives. We knew the pool was open for business.
All this brings us to Wednesday, June 2, 1993, the last day of fourth grade for me, and the last day of sixth for my sister. That morning, I strutted into school slinging a backpack without books and only my swimsuit and towel tucked inside it off my shoulder. I was damn near running up the two flights of stairs heading to my classroom before the 9:00 AM morning bell when I brushed into the Secretary. She stopped, turned, and gave me a look saying slow the you-know-what-down.
“I hope you have a great last day of school,” she said. “Sometimes going fast doesn’t mean you get to be first.”
“Uhh, okay,” I said, confused but assuming she meant not to run up the stairs.
Then, she looked me square in the eyes and smiled in a way I had seen before just never from her. She uncurled her lips slowly, then kind of flicked up her eyebrows. I looked up at her the way Kevin McCalister looked at Joe Pesci in Home Alone.
Hmm, I thought. Best friends with Grandma. That look. The two of them up to something. But, what, I wondered.
Six hours and thirty minutes later all of us in the classroom were coiled up like rattlesnakes full of pixie-stick venom and Klondike Bars ready to strike at summer. It felt like the anticipation that came with every Friday during the school year had collected as one in our bloodstreams, had simmered all day, and now was ready to boil.
B tapped his feet on the hardwood floor.
Ryan passed a note and giggled with the girl next to him, a curious development beginning that spring when he became the first of us able to form a full sentence when talking to a girl.
Mike drew pictures of inside linebackers mashing against fullback kickout blocks into his spiral-bound notebook. He rubbed his fists together while considering his next pencil sketch.
Finally, the speaker up in the corner of the room next to the American Flag and poster reminding us of where success and work live in relation to each other in the dictionary, rumbled. I heard chatter in the background, even laughs.
Was the whole office in on whatever Grandma was up to? I worried.
“Congratulations on another year. We’ve so enjoyed teaching all of you (slight cough, throat clearing) and wish you a summer full of friends, playful laughter, and outdoor adventures. Last, and in the words a dear friend wanted me to share: In the race of life, sometimes being craftier is better than running faster.”
For a moment I wondered why she had again shared this message. But only for a moment because the instant the bell rang ran we tore through the school and sprinted the five blocks to Grandma and Grandpa’s house like we were trying out for the Jamaican bobsled team.
Not like it mattered, though. By the time we got there we ran smack into my sister and her three best friends laughing poolside with Grandma while dangling their feet in the water. Grandma swirled something in a cocktail glass while my sister and her friends made a show of sipping their Shirley Temples. Empty Flavor-Ice wrappers littered the ground near them. Grandma’s smile widened when she saw me frown. They’d clearly been waiting for this moment.
“About time you got here. What took so long?” The girls all laughed.
We looked at each other, confused and frustrated, bested already and summer had just started. I turned to Grandpa seeking, I don’t know, camaraderie or something. He cackled loud enough to scare the cows in Iowa, then sipped from a tall mug of Stroh’s, and shrugged.
“Just needed to be a little faster today, that’s all,” My sister said. “Or, you know, craftier.”
“And maybe have a little help from a friend,” one of her friends added.
Grandma winked at the girls, sat back, and waved her hand through a cloud of smoke floating now over the chilly blue water. She looked pleased, I remember thinking.
“What!?” I shouted.
They nodded at the bench to my left. I looked, and written in pristine handwriting saw four notes each excusing my sister or one of her friends to see the same doctor—a curiously named Dr. John Black—at 1:00 pm on June 2nd. The Secretary’s stamp marked them as official excused absences.
“Cheaters!” Ryan shouted.
“Not fair!” I called.
“It’s like I always say,” Grandma started. “If you plant corn, you get corn. And sometimes being a little crafty is better than just running fast.”
“Game point,” B said spinning the small rubber basketball in his hands. He stood at the far side of the shallow end and passed it to Ryan. Ryan fake dribbled his way closer to the basket. B darted under the water toward the plastic hoop on the other side, the one standing four or so feet tall on the edge of the pool. He popped out, grabbed my shoulders, heaved me into the deep end, and caught an alley-oop from Ryan.
“Three in a row. Can’t hang with us!” Ryan hollered as he and B high-fived.
“Gonna be a long summer for you boys,” B said holding Mike’s head under water.
“One more,” I said. “We got this one.”
My mom, a fifth-grade teacher at a rival elementary school had arrived just in time to watch Mike and I lose another game. “B,” she yelled, “you going to let anyone else win any games this summer?’’
“Already won four in a row,” he called back.
On most weeknights, Mom lugged with her a big bag full of papers to grade and lessons to create. She would sit at the kitchen table with my sister and me after dinner jumping between helping us answer our homework and scoring the quizzes her class took that day. Today, though, she exhaled a huge sigh of relief, smiled bigger than she had in months, and carried no homework of her own.
“Chardonnay!” Grandpa raised his arms like a Priest at mass blessing the sacrament.
“If you insist,” Mom said, and Grandpa went to pour her a glass. When he returned, he sat and talked with Mom and Grandma, the three of them letting the sun shine on their bare feet and spirits set them at ease while we swam relay races in the pool.
As the afternoon slipped into evening, we sat outside the pool near each other. Our fingers had wrinkled, and we wrapped our cold bodies in warm beach towels. The sun started to close its eyes for the night, and its friend the moon looked on faintly from up in the distance. Grandma nipped at her drink. Grandpa did the same, tilting his eyes to the sky and smiling as if counting the still appearing stars.
“Well,” Grandma started. “We came up with the idea because we knew how mad it would make all you boys and that sounded like fun. Plus, who doesn’t want to spend their last afternoon of school watching Days of our Lives, eating lunch, and swimming. We didn’t know exactly how to get the girls out of school until your mom….” All eyes turned to Mom.
“I knew I knew that handwriting!” I shouted.
“Until” Grandma continued, “Your mom had the brilliant idea of the doctor’s notes.” Laughter, more than even the setting sun or rising moon, filled the night’s air.
As we sat there, everyone staying a little longer than we would have if we had school the next day, it occurred to me the best thing about the last day of school wasn’t the school year ending, but rather the summer starting -- and with it all the special firsts to be experienced.
The first leap off the diving board stretching to catch the waterproof football before it hits the water. The first stomach smack against the cold pool.
The first spark of fireflies on a night when the air feels warm, the people you love are all together, and there’s no homework to force the time to end.
The first run to the basement to pour Grandpa a Stroh’s from an oversized tap.
The first game of Ghost in the Graveyard, and the first weeknight sleepover.
The first summer prank and the inside jokes that come with it.
The first night falling asleep knowing the endless possibilities tomorrow holds.
Mom, my sister, and I walked the quarter mile home from Grandma’s house. We ordered a pizza and gathered in our basement for our first summer movie night. Grease dripped from our fingers and marinara spotted our cheeks. We stretched out on couches and buried ourselves in old blankets while our eyes fought losing battles with sleep, holding on for as long as they could to the last moments of this last day of school.
I drifted off somewhere before Dottie lost the World Series so her kid sister, Kit, could win.
In the morning, I would wake, and it would mark another first—the first full day of summer vacation.
And that would be pretty cool.