My friend Jack Spatafora talks up the end of summer in an e-blast:

Remember when schools opened the day after Labor Day…? No longer. Another tradition iced. Instead, these once-languid days of August are now witnessing a clutter of school and college openings. And with them, the unofficial start of a new year.

 

You can feel it in the air as parents and children change their rhythms…faculties gear up….local retailers stock up

…and the city’s mood segues from relaxing to striving. If you look really close, Chicagoland is becoming a giant mural you can actually study in live-action.

 

Starting with the pre-school kids out there eyeing their siblings bus off to the grand mystery known as the classroom…then the sibs themselves, conflicted between reluctance and anticipation…along with those traffic guards grand-parenting their wards along the way….and don’t forget the faculties waiting in a local school or somewhere in a distant campus.

 

This is a living mural of a living population gearing up for a whoosh of events hurtling us toward that distant trio of Fall/Winter holidays now almost in sight. It’s something like waking up in a time warp, for before you and those youngsters quite realized, it has made its imperative entrance.

 

True, there is an entire aura of politics, terrorists, and globalists hovering over everything else. However for now, for August, for Chicago, this is the world that counts most. Kids — yours and mine — filling the mural with yet another new year’s burst of dreams and dreads.

 

Watching them, we have to hope [and help] those dreams beat out those dreads….