Please excuse my day at Stratford.
The letter, I assume, slipped through in the very late spring or early summer when my guard was down. The last of the year’s grim report cards had been intercepted and destroyed in accordance with an ambitious — but largely successful — information control program. With the warmth of summer and the promise of freedom, though, I had begun to rest on my laurels.
It was middle school and I had made up my mind that I did not particularly care for math or Spanish and would not concern myself with learning either one. Looking back, it probably would have been less effort to capitulate to the adults’ demands, but what can you do?
At the parent-teacher conferences, they insisted that things would be better if I would simply apply myself, obviously blind to the fact that I was applying myself very much in my quest to avoid all schoolwork. While the other children learned how to conjugate verbs, I spent hours dreaming up convoluted excuses for why I had not done my homework and doing precise calculations to determine the minimum amount of effort that I could exert while still narrowly passing classes.
In an age of email and cell phones, it was impossible to prevent all of the news from reaching my parents, but I did well when it came to preventing flareups. I deleted voice messages and blocked phone numbers. The mail arrived each day around the time that I returned from the toil of school. I would carefully pluck out the letters with the dreaded “To The Parent/Guardian of Ian McKnight” labels before leaving the rest of the mail casually on the dining room table. If I had a moment alone, I would shred or burn the letters. If I risked drawing attention to myself, I would dispose of them in a park trash can a few blocks away.
All of that effort was lost on the warm day when I missed the letter. It was a moment that would cast a long shadow for years — a failure of stunning proportions. If I was a government, there would be resignations, task forces, and committees of inquiry. Investigations would last for years and result in the release of long reports printed on reams of paper. Some people might go to jail. I am not a government, though. I simply spent several days sulking in my room.
Terrible things arrive by mail every day. The mail brings IRS audit notices, medical test results, horrible legal documents, and, occasionally, envelopes filled with anthrax. None of those is so damning to a middle schooler as a sentence to three weeks of summer school.
More than a decade later, the horror of the experience is seared into my memory. Visiting a school in the summer is not unlike visiting the beach in February. It feels unnatural to be in such a barren, hellish wasteland, and one can only hope to escape as quickly as possible.
The underlying educational philosophy of the summer school program seemed to be that if they could only pin us down for more instructional time, we would come to love math. This was not so, but they did break my spirits enough to teach me the order of mathematical operations. PEMDAS. It is all that I remember.
There is a certain anomie that comes with summer school. The other captives and I drifted listlessly through each day. There was a vending machine full of Arnold Palmer, which was our only source of joy as we drank it by the gallon. Outside, we heard the cries of those who had done their homework as they were told and got to spend their summer as children are meant to spend it.
When it was announced that we would be forced to write an essay (which, during the summer, was an unthinkable horror), I knew that I would have to escape. The shame of summer school had been kept from my grandparents, and I had previously made arrangements to visit the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival with them that happened to conveniently overlap with the last week of my sentence. Even as a child, I enjoyed live theater, and the possibility of escaping across an international border added a certain allure.
I lived two lives ahead of my exit. I left summer school on Friday afternoon thanking the teachers and remarking about how I was so eager to work on my essay when we saw each other again the next week. When I got home twenty minutes later, I told my parents how glad I was that I had finally finished summer school, how “yes, I can’t believe it was three weeks already either,” and how excited I was to go to Stratford with the grandparents (only the third point being sincere).
There is a scene at the end of Argo, a dramatization of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, in which men with machine guns chase a 747 down the runway at the Tehran airport to prevent the hostages from escaping the country. I had expected something of this caliber when I made my great escape, but the Canadian border agents took a cursory look at our passports, mentioned that we were “in for a real treat” with Stratford’s staging of West Side Story, and sent us on our way.
By the time that they took attendance back in the States, I was long gone. Somebody from the school got through to my parents, and they got through to my grandparents, but there was nothing that could be done. I was free.
My parents demanded answers, but the best I could offer was a “Huh, weird. What can you do?” Then we headed off to see Colm Feore in Macbeth.
I never did get around to the essay.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber.
I, like many of Michigan’s legislative staff, have spent much of the last year as a sort of emergency customer service backup for a completely collapsed Unemployment Insurance Agency. We are civil servants, but we are not bureaucrats in the traditional sense — we have greater autonomy than regular executive branch functionaries, and human empathy is, notably, a part of our work.
Working so exclusively on unemployment insurance has thrust us into the world of pure bureaucracy, which is new for many of us. In his book, Graeber attempts to answer the questions I have shouted at my computer for months: questions like “Why have we done this to ourselves???” and “How can this possibly be???”
Graeber offers his explanation for how we came to live in an “age of total bureaucratization” and why we all seem to love our world of bureaucracy after all.
Punxsutawney Phil Predicts Six More Weeks of Winter from ABC News on Twitter.
I, like most Americans, have always had at least a peripheral awareness of the concept of Groundhog Day. It was not until this year that I saw a video of the prediction happening, however. It is a delight beyond what I ever dreamed it could be.
“You look beautiful today,” a man whispers to the groundhog before another man called Shingleshaker reads from a scroll referring to the groundhog as the “seer of seers — the prognosticator of all prognosticators!”