A calendar year seems kind of random - the length of time between one page and a page 12 pages after. I used to find it poetic that the year began in the deep of winter, then blossomed outward toward summer - only to pull dramatically into itself in autumn, like a Martha Graham dance. But then I learned of The Southern Hemisphere. Wasn’t ready for that. Winter in July. Santa on the beach. Spiders big as dinner plates. The world gone mad.

The School Year seems more stable. Its scheduling is in no way standardized, just somewhere between Memorial Day and Labor Day in the US, with monthly holidays dispersed like marshmallow bits in a breakfast cereal and sometimes (if you live in the right geographic area) an occasional snow day as the prize at the bottom of the box. The school year was always comforting to me because it held a promise: by the end of it, I would know something new, something that I did NOT know at the beginning. Buildings full of people were paid real money to make absolutely certain this promise was fulfilled, not just for myself but for millions of young people.

This was cool, because there was no industry supporting or steering how tall we were getting or any other changes we were experiencing, yet the Basic Skill Sets in our heads were upgraded year after year, for over a decade, whether we wanted to learn anything or not.

(Oh, sure, I could have dropped out of school and put on a leather jacket and dark sunglasses and grown a beard and gotten a motorcycle and explored the open road, but it would have been hard to afford my comic books and I don’t know how I would have carried our pekingese dog along with me unless I bought him some kind of special sidecar.)

School year learning was always a bit of a blind bag prize operation: we all knew that algebra was math…of some kind, but we didn’t know if we were going to like it until we were in the class already. Then subjects we already liked might be thrown a spanner if the teacher was in question, like the one with the WWII uniforms (Axis, not Allies). He chose odd poems.

Still, we were smarter, somehow, at the end of every school year. We all had this Voyage of Discovery in common, which was slightly bonding, and new names to call ourselves - freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. Such fun.

Did I learn a lot in school? Yes, yes I did, but honestly the classes were only half of it. There was How To Talk To People in grade school and How To Get People To Talk To Each Other in high school - social lessons not on the printed menu that often had a more lasting impact than the scheduled board of fare. In high school I also learned How To Take A Punch, How Not To Get Punched, How To Get Out Of A Shut Locker From The Inside and What People Really Mean When They Say Things. Sadly, these were also valuable lessons later on.

My best college class was the Prog-Rock seminar a roommate gave all of us during senior year. I believe it was around his birthday, he was turning 21, and had a big weekend planned. Months before he had gathered money from us for a surprise event, which he only revealed the weekend before at a private seminar in his room.

He used his own albums and CDs to give us a crash course in the history and importance of Progressive Rock: the eclectic instrumentation, epic arrangements, virtuosic solos, mystical lyrics - he spoke for quite a while but we were each allowed a beer and the songs were long and I was kind of sleepy.

Then he revealed that one of our events was going to see Yes, who I only knew from their 90125 album, with the big MTV hit “Owner of a Lonely Heart”.

This level of familiarity classified me firmly as a moron, which I was blatantly told by our ad-hoc professor, who assigned me extra listening homework before the concert. It was a hard class.

But it wasn’t the lectures that stood out, it was the field trips.

The crowd at Yes was a lot different from the James Taylor show I’d seen that summer. Since I hadn’t heard all of their other albums, many songs were new to me. It was all kinds of fascinating for reasons both artistic and sociological.

Then came Saturday. At 5PM we all got in somebody’s car and drove 40 minutes to see the band RUSH. Good grief. They were like electric druids. Something changed in my very soul that weekend, and even though this work wasn’t counted in my cumulative GPA, I am very proud of what I learned there.

Now I am an adult, very nearly an elder one, and can learn whenever I want, or more to the point whenever I can find the time. Which is ironic, as all my time as an adult is spent working, at a job, which was supposed to be the actual point of school.

We spend over a decade learning every day in order to get Good Jobs where learning is rarely we are paid to do.

Well, as a new sort-of-elder American, I am standing in defiance. Or I will here, in a minute… this chair is really low and I’ve been sitting in it a while. Oof. There we go.

This “school year” I am creating a curriculum for myself. I saw online that people can learn Mandarin in 127 days. They brag about being able to order in restaurants. I don’t really need that flex, so I’m going a different direction.

I bought a new book of rock guitar licks, a full course on advanced slight-of-hand coin illusions, I’m going to write three short stories and a one-act play. By May. We even renewed our subscription to Masterclass™, so I might become a tennis pro or international diplomat.

Next summer I won’t be an acrobat or an EGOT, but I will know something I didn’t know today. I don’t know when I plan to squeeze this all in, but if there’s one thing I have learned, it’s that there’s no such thing as spare time.

P.S.: You’re not gonna believe this, but I actually found recordings of the EXACT SHOWS I SAW. I just got the cities mixed up backward.

Yes:

Rush:

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