A Hymn to Summer School: The [Blue-Collar] Colossus

I have a meeting with a school administrator today. He perspires gently into his linen shirt, the office building built too long ago to keep out the urgent heat of Chapel Hill at noon in May. He is generous with his laughter, even though I have shaken his hand too hard and hurt him with the rings I uncertainly put on this morning. After years of being in the military I am still learning how to dress without the simple professionalism of a precisely regulated uniform—how to wear jewelry and makeup and my hair any way I please—how to shake hands gently, to walk slowly, to speak softly without cursing—how to relax in the maddening confinement of a classroom chair for two hours—how to resist the urge to sprint hard away from the crowds of too-young students whose mouths seem locked open, ringing and ringing over the campus, red tongues gulping down air, seething everywhere in insect-like groups, brand-name shoes clicking like antennae on the cobblestones.

But on this day (the second of summer school, the sort of warm, thick day you can press yourself into like a spoon into cream) these stresses suddenly seem absent, or only lightly, bearably present. The children have gone home for the summer. The students who remain drift far from each other, passing ships, misty lights in the distance. We are the blue-collar kids, the working parents, the veterans, the commuters, the introverts, the misanthropes, the athletes, the hare-footed and headstrong. We are ghosts on the sleeping campus: we endure. I am able to see the beauty of these peers of mine, the bricks and grass we walk on, the worn desks and blackboards we brush our hands against, in a way I’ve been blind to during the mad crush of fall and spring.

Last year, I shared an amphitheater hall with 200 strangers, witnessing (and participating in) a collective mental glazing over. The room was always punch-drunk from the necessarily diluted and generalized lectures. The lecturer was a washed-out pinprick in the distance, dozens of laptops and cell phones glinting against her voice. Today, I sit in a class with just eight people who love the subject I love, all rapt, cheerfully argumentative, fiercely involved. 

I hear you, Professor, your love for the German language leaking out of the stories you tell in class, your eyes bright with nostalgia, the odd and sweetly conspiratorial way you hunch your shoulders when you laugh. 

I see you, stranger at the bus stop, chin on hand, elbow on knee. You are impossibly beautiful, a bas-relief carved from mahogany or obsidian, an orange scarf tied around your dark hair, lost in a serious thought. 

I praise you, mother who pushes her stroller with one hand while holding a textbook close to her face with the other. 

I am grateful for the fellowship we take part in during these few short months, even if it is never overtly acknowledged nor even fully understood by any of us. 

Give me your single mothers, your soldiers and sailors, your huddled scholarship kids yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your non-traditional academia, I say. Summer is our golden door.

Romany Arrowsmith is a US Navy veteran studying Linguistics and Peace, War and Defense at UNC Chapel Hill.