When I walked out of Lincoln School, Bennett Junior High, or Manchester High on days in June marking the last day of the school year, over two months of freedom stretched before me. I could ride my bike or walk to Globe Hollow to go swimming. I could go to the Mary Cheney Library to pick out books that I chose to read, not ones assigned to me by my teacher. I could stay up late and watch re-runs of television shows I was not allowed to watch on school nights. Or I could do nothing but sit on our enclosed front porch and listen to an approaching thunderstorm. I was free!
I was unaware how my sheltered life made these summers of freedom possible. I never stopped to think about how my father worked through most of the summer except for the two weeks of vacation he got from the post office. Nor did I think of the endless housework my mother did regardless of the season. She not only prepared all three meals for the family each day, but also cleaned up afterwards. Mom did all the laundry, and she even made the beds for not only herself and my father but for her three kids each day. Perhaps that’s how things were done in many homes during that time, but I still should have seen how unfair this was to her.
As the years passed, I had more chores to do such as raking leaves in the fall, shoveling the sidewalk after it snowed, and mowing the lawn in the summer. I delivered the Manchester Evening Herald on time each day Monday through Saturday to my seventy or so customers. But compared to the responsibilities that awaited me in adulthood, my burdens were light and my yoke was easy.
When I was walking to Manchester High School with a group of neighborhood guys for my first day of school in 1964, we passed by Lee’s Market on Spruce Street. A man in his thirties, an old guy by my reckoning then, was making a delivery to the store. He stopped pushing his cart filled with loaves of Wonder Bread and smiled at us as we approached him. With a wistfulness in his voice that I detected even then, he said, “Man, I wish I could switch places with you guys.” We all said at once, “Yeah, that sounds great, let’s do that!” but we kept walking as he maneuvered the cart to the front door of the store. It’s seems to me one of the ironies of life is kids wanting what they perceive as the freedom of adults: drive your own car, stay up late, no homework, go on dates, not have to mind your parents, while adults want to go back to a freedom they once longed to escape from. Maybe the freedom we all need is from the desires that keep us from living fully in the present moment.
David James Madden