The Last Bell

Saying goodbye to the school next door

Watercolour by Lisa Napier

For 31 of the past 34 years, on the final week of June, I have had a ritual: I pour myself a cup of coffee. I step into my yard, which is next to a school. Then I just stand there and watch the scene unfold.

The school just beyond the fence has had many names; now it goes by LeMarchant-St. Thomas Elementary. On the day I’m talking about—the close of the school year—its yard seems to vibrate, with an energy that has been building for weeks.

I remember what it was like: the dwindling attention span, the wistful looks cast out the window where the sun always seemed to shine tantalizingly.

When I was an elementary school student in this very neighbourhood, I knew nothing of the secret the adults were keeping from us: that we needed to treasure the two months of summer vacation because those 62 days would be the most freedom we would ever enjoy until the CPP kicked in.

Back then, it was enough for me to understand that once I walked out that door, every day from there on in was mine to spend as I pleased.

No great adventures beckoned; no trips to the beloved family cottage or stays at some summer camp to be reunited with old friends. I knew from experience that a lot of summer vacation in a small Canadian city, in the time before screens, when kids were mostly left to entertain themselves, was going to be kind of boring

Yet as the big day neared, it seemed like I needed to be weighted down in my seat, or else, in my excitement, I would levitate and float off into the air. When the doors finally opened for the last time, we were like race-hounds after the starting gate had been lifted, our Converse-sneakered feet just grazing the pavement as we sprinted into Summer.

This year, I paid particular attention to the end-of-school proceedings: our Halifax house is on the market; more than likely, this will be the last time—without the cops being called—that I will stand and watch the final morning in the elementary school year play out,

It will be hard to leave our house for a thousand reasons, big and small. One of them will be to no longer live across the street from the now-shuttered school I once attended, where a teacher each day read us a chapter of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books, and, after the bell rang, out on the school yard, we pitched cards, and honed our hand-to-eye coordination trying to hit a tennis ball with a canoe paddle.

Back in those sectarian times, the school next door was for the Roman Catholics in the neighbourhood. By the time my offspring entered LeMarchant-St. Thomas everybody went there. Over the decades, I watched them come and go, the student body, once lily white, changing to reflect the city’s vibrant diversity.

It would be a lie to say that on some level I didn’t live vicariously through the kids who came and went: How they raced to school in the morning, just happy to be young and alive; how, at recess, they would burst through the door, and, missing not a beat, resume the game they were playing before being summoned to class. The joy when they saw a pal. The way, untroubled by the complexities of the world, their voices always seemed to ring with innocence and hope.

Some things were different in my day, I say, slapping my knee like Jed Clampett, remembering how we roamed freely to and from school without a phalanx of parental bodyguards and how, at least once, we marked the final day of school by throwing our scribblers into the air.

But kids are kids, right? And what matters now is surely the same thing that mattered then. At least that was how it seemed to me, standing on the doorstep, watching, probably for the last time, the past overlay the present.

It was great to see them hurry by with the school’s piped-in version of Pharrell Williams singing Happy as their backbeat.

One kid, almost at the family car, turned and ran back to the school fence, so he could wish Tommy, whom he might not see until September, a good summer.

As the youngsters piled into the school bus—LeMarchant=St. Thomas is a French Immersion school, which means some of them have to travel a distance to get there—a staff member hustled over to bid them farewell.

Out on the school yard, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eight did laps on a two-wheeled bike, still adorned with training wheels, as if wanting to relive the great memories of the last year, one last time. But a parent beckoned.

Soon they were all gone; the school yard was empty. Because, on such a day, why would anyone linger?