Guest Essay | Kathleen Clary Miller: I Still Feel “Back-To-School”

The air begins to subtly change, the light is a little lower—the end of summer, even at age 72, still feels like back-to-school.  

I can’t shake the urge to walk into Vroman’s to buy spiral notebooks and whatever latest pen iteration belongs to this year, even though when I was a girl, “sea-island blue” was the color of ink cartridge I slipped into my Parker fountain pen, ready for the first day.

Despite my having to kick off my sandals and forsake barefooted walks on Balboa Island for the shackles of saddle shoes and itchy socks, not to mention trading bikinis and tank tops for starched uniforms, once I was back inside Vroman’s filling a new leather bookbag with essentials, my enthusiasm for scholastics simmered under my sunburned skin. 

I was a year older!  Moving up in grade level and stature would lead me, eventually, to eighth grade graduation, high school senior sweater and privileges, like using the front stairs to the classrooms and having our own locker room, separate and apart from the underclass riff-raff. Although beyond that, I feared the unknown world of university, that seemed eons away from my comfortable routine at Mayfield School, where I’d begun kindergarten and would remain through high school graduation, my cocoon behind gates that separated me not only from Bellefontaine Street, but also from the hustle and bustle of political and societal angst and confusion with which I wanted no part.

Despite being older, (and much more in tune now with the planet’s joys and woes) I still feel it—that change in season that people who have never lived in Southern California think does not occur.  Autumn, oh unbelievers, is a season here; You just have to close your eyes and feel it coming on the breeze, when the liquidambars turn their brilliant colors, and you poke along behind school buses on the road again, when the sun grows softer and school spirit grows higher by the day.

There is a part of me that wishes I could go back and be that innocent girl again, worried only about homework getting accomplished and studying for the next test.  There was comfort in that routine, and when I see the children heading out on early  mornings, for a moment I am one of them in what was then a much smaller world during a far simpler time.

Kathleen Clary Miller is a native of Pasadena.  She is the author of essays and stories that have been published for 20 years in newspapers and magazines across the country.  Although she currently lives in Fallbrook, Pasadena will always be her home.