![]() “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” in a 1967 musical, insisted that “You Must Believe in Spring” when Ali MacGraw, in “Love Story,” from 1970, watched Ryan O’Neal dodge and weave on ice skates in Central Park, the hills surrounding Wollman Rink were blanketed in snow. “Sumer Is Icumen In,” from the thirteenth century, is one of the oldest songs in English the four seasons were traditional for half a millennium before Vivaldi composed concerti for spring, summer, autumn, and winter, in 1725. The seasons as we know them combine the astronomical seasons (marked by events involving movements of planets and stars), meteorological seasons (characterized by weather and climate patterns), religious seasons, and times of planting and harvest. Like gentrification, COVID-19 has accelerated a process that has been under way for several decades in a few months, it has made the seasons seem as arbitrary as the pro-sports seasons that are now being played out in empty stadiums and in the N.B.A. The coronavirus pandemic, together with recurring natural phenomena brought on by climate change, is sharply altering our sense of the seasons. The unravelling of back-to-school rituals is part of a larger shift. Without kids leaving home for school, for many of us the beginning of the new school year feels the way the coming of fall feels for an Easterner in California: a symbolic change without the literal changes that accompany it. After six months, the long-anticipated release from the challenge of balancing work, school at home, meals, and child care isn’t coming. Parents are registering the change differently: children, usually at a distance come September, are taking classes near at hand. The adoption of distance learning is as dramatic a change in American education as when the K-12 academic calendar took its present form (about a hundred and eighty school days, with summers off), more than a century ago. More than fifty million students will take part from home, while many of those who are on school property will assemble for classes in playgrounds and on sports fields, wearing masks and disinfecting their hands. It hardly needs saying that, in large parts of the United States, this school year will be one like no other. Two minutes later, I was paid up and cycling home, some lyrics from Talking Heads’s “Life During Wartime” running through my head: “Burned all my notebooks / What good are notebooks? / They won’t help me survive.” In this year of long lines (in June, the socially distanced line outside of the Whole Foods on Third Avenue stretched across the Gowanus Canal), there was no line at all. I braced for a long line: some years, buying school supplies at Staples, I’ve waited half an hour to reach the register. ![]() Then I ducked into a familiar aisle and got three boxes of yellow pencils to bring home for my three sons, a back-to-school ritual. I went there the other day to send a package via UPS. There’s a Staples store on Fourth Avenue, in Gowanus, a part of Brooklyn that lately feels less and less like New York City and more like the rest of the United States.
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