RETURN TO THUMBNAILS | |
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(#149) PUNAHOU SCHOOL:
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It's hard to sit at a wooden desk and listen to the teacher drone on about geometry or the Hundred Years' War when right outside the perfume of flowers and deep rich sea crashing and beckoning lifts its warm embrace and says come to me. But you have to. For one-hundred-and-fifty years The Reverend & Mrs. Hiram Bingham have said, time for school. Hurry up, please, it's time.* Remember the joy of liberation when the school bell rang at the end of the day; at the end of Friday's long afternoon; at the end of June and the feast of summer spread out before you and you did not have to get up in the morning and go to school anymore. By the end of summer you didn't want to admit it but to tell the truth you were getting a little bored and missed your friends and after Labor Day the intoxicating smell of new school clothes and new books and new cedar pencils and it wasn't so bad after all. It was even fun. Ah, variety. The spice of life.** * T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) The Wasteland (1922) ** William Cowper (1731-1800) The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece |