The waning days of July have a knack of resurrecting old
memories, and not always the most pleasant ones. An unwelcome packet used to arrive in my mailbox in the late 1970s at around 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 very definitely 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”
packet’s recounting the school opening dates and various orientations that faithfully got me down. It always seemed that it was a little too early to have
this information in my possession and, worse than that, permanently lodged on my brain. The packet, 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 this annual summer reminder was a real bummer for those of us
who loathed school. And I'd hazard a guess we were the considerable 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 as a matter of fact. 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)