Yesterday (at long last!), my son Ben started first grade. August was a long month—Ben's day camp ended a few days into the month, assorted ailments had me less active than normal, and we spent far too much time together at home. Why the zoo animals sharing cages don't rend each other's flesh after a few weeks of constant togetherness is beyond me, because I, for one, grew cranky. It's hard to concentrate on freelance editing with a kid in the room (or so the procrastinator is wont to say). And I had one of those milestone birthdays that put me in denial. ("I may have turned forty, but I have the health of an eighty-year-old!" I declared proudly.) So overall, August went on too long. Now it's September, and school started yesterday. From the selfish maternal standpoint, school's great for two reasons: (1) I get almost six hours of time to myself at home—time to edit and write, run errands, fritter away the hours, think, and just be; and (2) After school, we can hang out at the school playground for an hour and I can talk to actual adult humans. Oh, the luxury! I'll bet most freelancers/at-home parents can relate to this. I love my child, and I love time alone, but conversations that don't involve Hot Wheels cars are as precious as rubies. Last year's six kindergarten classes were grouped into eight smaller first-grade classes (yeah, it's a huge school—almost 1,600 students from pre-K to eighh grade). Last year, Ben's homeroom was the bilingual class—there weren't enough Spanish-English-speaking kids to fill a class, so about eight kids like Ben and Mohammed also learned a wee bit of Spanish. (The kids shuffle around for reading/language, so only the bilingual kids were learning to read and write in Spanish.) With the school budget allowing for more first-grade teachers, the kids were going to be redistributed, with few, if any, non-Hispanic kids in the bilingual group. I figured Ben would know several kids in his new homeroom. You know how many? One! And it wasn't a kid he knew from kindergarten—it was his best buddy from day camp. Hooray for day camp! And when they get assigned to their reading groups, presumably he'll know most of those kids, since the groupings are based on ability level. After school, approximately a zillion kids hit the playground, and the parents convened around the terraced concrete steps. Herewith, highlights of my conversations: • One German family spent the summer back in Germany and Switzerland. Remember what it was like growing up in the '70s in suburban America? Kids running free all day, going home at mealtimes but mainly playing outside with other neighborhood kids for hours on end? They can still do that in Germany. Toby's mom was delighted to not have to stage-manage his playtime. • A Polish mom asked if I could recommend a dentist for her son, David. I warned her that Ben's dentists are pricey and like to be paid up front, letting the patient's family do the waiting for insurance reimbursement. Not a problem, she said—they probably take Medicaid, and her son is covered through Illinois's universal health insurance for children. "David gets $600 a month of medications for his asthma, and Medicaid pays for that. He can see the doctor, he can go to the dentist. I don't know what I would do without that. Thank you, President Bush," she said. "Don't thank Bush—he'd get rid of Medicaid if he could. Thank the Democrats," I said. (The All Kids program was an initiative from Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He may be corrupt in terms of hiring practices, but he's our corrupt politician. He also ordered pharmacists in the state to dispense Plan B, and is working on universal preschool. I expect I'll be voting for him again, because I care more about issues like those than about cleaning up the state's pandemic corruption. Let's get some more progressive legislation and executive orders on the books, and then we can clean house.) • Another mother said that Germany's vibe of "safe for kids to play outside all day" was what it's like in her home country in Africa. "Which country?" I asked. Eritrea. I astonished her by having heard of Eritrea, first off, and by knowing where it is and that its independence came fairly recently (in 1991, to be precise). Apparently many Americans are not too geopolitically savvy. (Horrors!) Handy facts I picked up this morning from the Wikipedia article: The country's name derives from the Greek for Red (erythro) Sea. Hannibal went there in search of elephants a couple thousand years ago. There's a monument of a giant sandal, an iconic representation of the independence fighters. The country's right across the Red Sea from Yemen and Saudi Arabia. I don't know what percent of students at this school have parents born in other countries, but it's got to be a sizeable percentage. There are other Europeans and Africans, Mexicans, Asians, and South Asians. There's a very international vibe, and the parents speak many different languages, and yet the kids all sound the same—they're American kids, after all. Whoops, it's almost time to wake up Ben for First Grade II: The Second Day. Gotta go—