School Days, School Days, dear old Golden rule days! Reading and writing and rithmetic. Unquote.

In Wonder Women fashion we wonder how summertime flies by so much more quickly than ever before.

Our campers are coming home next week after 6 (yup!) weeks of camp. 

It feels as if cantaloupe filled with cottage cheese and iced coffee season(shout out to Linda Dietz) lasted much longer in the 60’s and 70’s.

We looked forward to school shopping and buying brand new white keds, blue loose leaf folders, colored tabs to divide social studies from algebra and colorful see thru pencil holders-but not so quickly.

A memorable excitement was wearing our first day of school outfits that were laid out in the chair next to our bed. New knee socks, label off. 

How bout the street lights? They went on so much later in the summer then they do now? When did Father Time become a Grandfather?

Please dude slow down we need to catch our breath. With self help books adding chapters on “recalibrating the Senior soul” we anxiously pull out plugs and hit the ground running. This abbreviated summer we took long walks and our games of play led the way to let’s have a cocktail around 5:00. We added a little Guacamole toast and summed things up with red velvet cupcakes. Got Shishito peppers anyone?

As long term memory takes center stage we fondly recall the days of climbing monkey bars, wearing very tight white rubber bathing caps to ward off the chlorine effects when we swam and how they added peanut butter to the ring ding formula and called them funny bones. Two pack Twinkie’s yes, please. 

So as we find ourselves in the first week of August with air pods in place we are “calling out around the world are you ready for a brand new beat?”

Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street.” Always love a Martha and the Vandellas tune as “ it doesn’t matter what we wore, just as long as we were there.”

So just for today as we eat half of a well toasted bialy with cream cheese, sip our iced coffee with half and half, we’ll sing along as Frankie Valli croons about late December back in “63” and Betty Buckley reminds us to “let the memories live again.”

Make it a great day for someone else.

This is just for the moment when we take our eyes off the screen, pick our head up from the daily News and wipe the fear and horror off our faces.

Then one day the sky fell down.
No chicken little warning- the house fell on the witches legs and just like that the emperor had no clothes.

Cinderella lost more than her slipper and the three blind mice could no longer run. Mother Goose stopped singing nursery rhymes and stood by as prisoners exercised around the “mulberry bush.” There were no rainbows and we waited for happier days to be here again-hit it Barbra with an A.

Severus Snape knew that “the dark arts are varied, ever changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and more clever than before.”

Even though Tom (Tom and Jerry) was the antagonist, all of us felt for Tom. “After all what good is a cat if he can’t get the better of a rat.” From our own little corner in our own little chair- uh, oh! we spied with our little eye a black cat crossing our path.

And to quote Elmer Fudd in his garden of evil- “Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits.” Only in that case, the hunter gets hunted always.

Then we ran into Mary Poppins who offered us a spoon full of sugar. It helped the medicine go down. We began to believe again and just like we know pruning flowers helps new ones grow bigger and brighter, alas the Prince of Tides helped our ship sail in.

We turned the beat around, stopped playing victim and got behind the wheel to claim our power back.

If you believe in magic, follow toto down the yellow brick road and know that somewhere between the curtain and the wizard is a place called Home.