Embracing the first chill of fall: memories of back-to-school dread and anticipation

It happened this week. Did you feel it?

Every year, around this time, there comes a slight breeze that ushers away the last bits of humidity from the long, sultry summer. And on this breeze is a little nip of cold…just a tiny chill to remind you of one thing, whether from your recent past or somewhere in the deep-dive archive of your lived experience.

That slight chill brushes across your face and, so triggered, one feeling creeps back up your spine and, almost certainly, carries with it just a twinge of dread.

It feels like the first day of school out there.

There is, of course, a chance you don’t share in this annual ritual in which the first signs of the changing season bring forth images and feelings first felt letting go of your mother’s hand, begrudgingly, and shuffling — little sneakers never actually leaving the worn, faded tile — into that kindergarten classroom for the first time.

Maybe you remember the first day of third grade, or of fifth, when you knew what you were getting into, and that first breezy chill was the harbinger of what was inevitably to come in the next week or so.

Sure, the new cartoons, and new episodes of the old ones, were on channel 5 in the morning and WPIX in the afternoon, but that was only because some kind-hearted station manager, knowing what you were facing, took pity on you.

Well, it was pity and, thanks to President Reagan, because there were toys on store shelves of all the characters on the screen.

Maybe your first-day welling of tension and apprehension only goes back as far as high school, when your public persona was a matter of long-established record, and it either fit in with those in power, and you were expected to uphold that standard, or it did not, and the next 10 months were going to be as much a matter of social survival as of educational absorption and preparation.

It’s also possible, your strongest back-to-school memories are post-secondary, and you had that one lecture-hall class that started way too early to be conducive with the summer job you decided to keep. Maybe the feeling you remember is missing that early class so often — they don’t take attendance, after all — it would be weird and off-putting to all concerned if you suddenly showed up and took a seat anywhere in the hall, so you can’t go back.

That feeling might be unique to the editor of this newspaper. Who knows?

Chances are, some of the above has had some resonance with you, either in your own memory or in watching your children endure the same build of existential despair when that initial bite of fall swirls through the trees.

It’s a rite of passage we’re often none too eager to complete but, more than maybe anything else, school is the one constant for the first decades of our lives, and — for good or for ill — how we feel about it coming back around again for another two semesters is established early, and those impressions are rarely of an annual fate we’re eager to embrace.

Except for the senior year of high school. Everyone loves the senior year of high school, don’t they? Our first real taste of casual Friday, only it lasts from September to June.

Other things are going to happen this fall. There will be a World Series. The studios will release all their Oscar-bait. Football will dominate the weekends and render all honey-do lists stagnant for the foreseeable future.

But there’s also something else on the horizon. Something that might just give you that same twinge of anxiety the first cool breeze does. Only this twinge isn’t about your past, it’s about our collective future.

Vote accordingly.