The waning
days of July have a knack for resurrecting old memories, and not always the
most pleasant ones. An unwelcome packet habitually arrived in my mailbox in the
late 1970s at this time of year. Amidst all the fun and frolic that I
was experiencing in those summers of my youth, these manila envelopes
underscored that the good times wouldn’t last forever—that their days were surely numbered. The fun and games would soon be over, because new school
years were right around the corner.
“Once
again I am writing to you in the middle of the summer with materials and
information concerning the opening of school in September,” the packets' cover
letters invariably began. They were actually addressed “Dear Parents,” because
the first order of business was establishing what the monthly tuition bills
would be for the coming school years. For those of us who attended Catholic
high school, this was no small matter. In 1978, Cardinal Spellman High School’s
tuition was $730, and that sum covered ten months through June 1979. Today, the
tuition at my alma mater is $7,250—a tenfold increase. I suspect that the “Once
again I am writing to you in the middle of the summer” packets are crammed with
even more apprehension than in the past. The $3 monthly tuition raise that
occurred in the 1978-79 school year was probably not a budget buster for too
many parents. The necessary tuition raises nowadays are, I fear, packed with a
more substantial wallop.
Honestly,
I didn’t concern myself with high school tuition back then. The folks picked up
the entire tab. College tuition was another story. But it was the “Once again I
am writing to you in the middle of summer” packets’ recounting the school
opening dates and various orientations that faithfully got me down. It always
seemed a little too early to have this information in my possession and, worse
than that, permanently lodged in my brain. The packets, too, highlighted how
fleeting summer vacations really were. If the middles of summers could come
around so awfully fast, the ends of summers could, logically, come around just
as quickly—and they always did, including in 1978. In fact, thirty-four summers
have come and gone since then, with a thirty-fifth one soon to be in the
history books.
Happily, I
don’t receive anymore “Once again I am writing to you in the middle of the
summer” packets in the mail, although now I don’t mourn a summer’s passing like
I once did. And that’s for a whole host of reasons, with one being that I don’t
have to return to high school in September. It cannot be denied that these annual summer reminders were bona fide bummers for those of us who loathed
school. And I'd hazard a guess we were in the majority.
A neighbor
of mine, who attended another Catholic high school in the Bronx, received
similar materials in the mail at around the same time as I did. And from that
day onward, he would incessantly intone that “summer’s almost over” and marvel
about the speedy passage of time. In retrospect, time really didn’t fly by in
my youth. The high school years seemed interminable. Now, four years go by in a
heartbeat, and summers even faster than that. Thank you for reading this blog
of mine—in the grand tradition of my old principal Monsignor White—in the
middle of the summer.
(Photo
from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)
