Today is Sept. 1, and Americans are starting another grade in school. For me, today is the first day of the 61st grade. I will learn things this year in 61st grade that I didn’t know last year, in 60th grade. I must say, being in 61st grade feels pretty awesome. That is a lot of learning.
To figure out what grade you are starting today, go back to the year you started first grade. For me, that was 1949. Realizing I started school in the first half of the last century is pretty awesome, also. There is no way I could be that old. Then, from your first-grade year, you just count up. I know there is some arithmetic way to do that in two seconds, involving some kind of n+1 formula, but in 60 grades I have never been able to learn it. I still have to do it on a piece of paper. First I list the years: 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, and so on, up to 09. Then, next to 49, I put a 1, then next to 50 a 2, and so on. Sure enough, when I reach 09, the number is 61.
For most Americans, September is the month we begin a new grade, because we were programmed that way. The school year in America traditionally began on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Now, of course, that has all changed. In the San Diego area, some grade-school kids actually started classes on July 27! Others started in August. My own journalism classes at Grossmont College started on Aug. 24. I wasn’t happy about it. I think having to go to school in August (or July!) is un-American and should be investigated.
I think the main thing I learned in 60th grade was that it really is cool, having the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. I had been wondering about that since the 32nd grade, when I was, uh, 37 years old. That year, in 32nd grade, I had already been writing a newspaper column for awhile, and I had the six-year-old imagination all right, but on experience I was shy. I still felt like a kid, not enough accumulation of experience yet, to call it a serious accumulation. I wasn’t yet experienced enough to say in a column, “I can tell you from experience,” and expect anyone to take it seriously. Last year, in 60th grade, I turned 65, and one of the first things I noticed was, when I told someone I could tell them something from experience, 99 percent of them took me seriously.
And that’s the way it worked out. Having the imagination of a six-year-old is really only another way of saying you can think outside the box, and thinking outside the box with the experience of a 65-year-old makes a lot of the stuff out there really dazzling, the kind of stuff I couldn’t possibly have imagined at 37. It must be because there is so much more experience inside the box now, and it is experience that powers, or at least boosts, imagination. I know that at six, I could never have imagined I would have this kind of imagination to look forward to. Now, on the first day of 61st grade, who knows where imagination will take me this year?
Today, already, on the first day of 61st grade, I am learning something. I have been reading papers in my office, turned in by students who were asked to avoid all media – no books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recordings, television or the internet – for 48 hours, then write about the experience. In semesters prior, I could always count on at least a third of the 30-odd students to report being able to escape the media hurricane into calmer waters, where they could reconnect with the analog world of sidewalks, parks, porches, sunshine, clouds, street and planet sounds, and idle conversation with friends. Always, they reported how pleasant it was, even though it was only an interlude, and they could not escape the media world for long, or entirely.
In this batch of papers, I can find only two who report anything about an analog experience, while a few of the others write of their good fortune at being born into a media world, and belonging to what one called “the iPod generation.” “Just look around you,” wrote one, “it’s a beautiful sight.” Am I going to learn, in 61st grade, of evidence that all our children are slowly turning inward toward media, forever?
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