I had to write an essay to graduate from my umbrella school. I decided to write my exit essay on what it was like to home school.
No one could call my childhood anything other than wonderful. More than a happy time in life, something substantive and profound occurred. Literally and figuratively flipping open my lap top opens the window into my life as a home-schooler. Looking with pride at my hundred or so word documents, my fingers perched on the keyboard fill with the same adrenaline I felt each time I threw my all into an essay in the rosy light of our cozy kitchen late at night. Somehow that sensation naturally reconnects me to other, older late- night memories of playing with Star Wars figures at midnight. Then, too, my fingers tingled with a similar adrenaline, because something just as serious was going on. A part of me pines to go back to that gloriously unscheduled time that time when playing Legos and reading “Tintin” represented my goals for the day.
Beginning with my high school years, I occasionally found myself in the unfortunate position of waking up at a certain time to do something I’d rather not. One summer I volunteered as a group leader in Vacation Bible School; another year I took a baseball class that lasted every day, all day, for two weeks. It demoralized me when I had to go to bed early, wake up early, and participate in the artificiality of Vacation Bible School. In the case of baseball, even though I usually enjoyed my day, I found my freedom circumscribed. I believe that as a child I needed to feel an utter freedom about my day. Without it I could not have thrown myself into my play. I had to have time to do whatever was most important to me.
Going to bed when I chose and waking up whenever I happened to and doing whatever I wanted to prepared me for the structured world ahead of me. Lego battles remain and will always remain one of the most, if not the most, serious events in which I ever participated. Indeed, the amount of concentration William, David, Amy Dick and I invested in each battle we fought seems no less than the concentration I poured into preparing for my Anatomy and Physiology final this year. For the Dick and I all battles followed a strict system of rules. Each consisted of many scenes during which each figure changed position only slightly. Those regimented battles, I believe, played an important part in making me who I am today. They ingrained in me a sense of order that my impulsive soul would have fought if it had come from any other direction. Through ordered play, I subconsciously prepared to embrace the structure required of my eight page, point-within-point, rigorously crafted lab reports.
Though I discussed playing with Legos, I know I have only begun to penetrate what went on in that time of mystery, my childhood. How did I teach myself to read by studying the childlike drawings and advanced vocabulary of the “Calvin and Hobbes” comic books? What went on in my mind that even at the time I hardly knew about? And I will never fully know what affect reading a “Tintin” every night from nine to eighteen has had and is still having on me. At the very least, I know I owe some of my inquisitive nature to Tintin. All this and I have not even mentioned my extensive cataloging of baseball cards! At last now with a tear and a smile I realize I will no longer attend English class in my pajamas or eat breakfast in bed (quite so often.) This fall I will enter my freshman year at Framingham State College. No longer will I live such a leisurely life. Yet as I listen to the soul-full flute playing the sad but joyful “Last Rose if Summer” by Grieg I hope that as the last days of the August of my childhood pass away, I will have one last rose of summer.