Do you ever look around and discover that something has changed from the way you remember it, and you can’t pinpoint when or why, can’t remember the moments or the shifts and shadings that signaled the change, but there it is, definitely different than before? I experience this often now, which could have two things to say about me: that I have traveled far enough from my youth so that observable change has had time to take place, or that I have simply not been observing through all these years.
Some changes that occur are camera-snapped by my mind and retained with sure recall, but these are mostly events that happen in a short space of time, have a near-term effect, and usually elicit an emotional response. For instance, I can, with little effort, come up with the year, possibly the month, that the old wooden field house burned to the ground, in one night altering forever the visual aspect of that part of my TCU campus, leaving only a memory in its place. In like fashion, I can recall the time when the expansion and extension of Berry Street threatened to, and finally did, erase Miss Lorraine Sherley’s beloved house and garden on Wabash Ave., triggering a strongly stated opposition from that formidable lady and causing a stir the likes of which the city officials probably had never encountered and from which they likely never recovered. I can readily seize on that eventful kind of change. It is harder to get a handle on the gradual, sneaky type that has no discernible beginning and that leaves few clues.
The “break” — in the sense of intermission, time out, King’s X — has recently caught my attention as something that has undergone considerable change since my early years at TCU, and I can’t locate where along the way that happened. I can’t even recall that, back then, we used the term “break” for the few holidays we were allotted around Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and, for those of us who attended summer school, July 4th. Now there is a short break midway the Fall semester, a long month’s break between semesters at Christmas, and a week’s break in the Spring, which only occasionally coincides with the Good Friday holiday before Easter. My son tells me this was so during his student years in the seventies. When did it change? I have been here; how could I not have noticed?
As I write this, TCU is in the Spring Break week, an annual holiday that, if one is to believe the hoopla and hype, has become an internationally observed funtime celebration for college students. It is not possible to be around college life today and not be aware of the SPRING BREAK. Travel agents and travel clubs, airlines, hotels, fashion merchants, ski outfitters, and tanning parlors have found a lucrative market in this holiday of holidays, and they do not miss a minute milking it. By mid-January the TCU campus newspaper, the Skiff, is full of tantalizing advertisements, beckoning students to beach paradises from the Carolinas to Cancun and to ski resorts in Colorado and New Mexico. Colorful brochures entice “breakers” to tropical shores or snowy slopes, where they can have unlimited fun, fun, fun.
Travel Service International, Inc., publishes a tabloid called “Spring Break News” that shows pictures of sunbathers and party-goers on crowded South Padre Island beaches and in Cancun hotel pools, with such irresistible text as: “One Breaker admitted that some members of her college group last year started partying around 10:00 AM everyday and never slept! At night, she and her friends frequented … a nightclub with dancing, new wave music, a great ocean view and a bar.” In one of the come-ons for selecting a Mexican location for the Great Break, the University Beach Club declares it has the “wildest party marathon” with “$10-all-you-can-drink parties!” The Campus Beach Club travel service dangles this carrot, “… don’t forget that the drinking age in Mexico is 18,” but follows with the reassurance that “since most people do not have cars, there is rarely a drinking/driving problem.”
On the same page in the “Spring Break News,” this time in regard to the safety of flights, the Campus Beach Club proclaims they believe in “the value of safe travel for their student clients and peace of mind for parents.” Thank goodness for that. I thought the parents entered the picture only at the toll gate.
When I think back to the pauses in my college year routines, I wonder at the apparent lack of FUN we must have had. Our use of time off must appear bland and boring to today’s student in the light of today’s doings. Of course, the academic calendar was different then, so that our scheduled holidays were of shorter duration. There were two days at Thanksgiving and possibly a week to ten days at Christmas. Both of these periods included days that were traditionally spent with family, and so, in our innocence and ignorance, we did. Christmas gave us the greatest number of days, but because the fall semester ended in mid-January, that time away from the classroom was usually spent at home, starting and/or finishing term papers and studying for final exams. The spring brought a four-day respite–Friday through Monday–surrounding Easter Sunday. Even if our parents had had the means and could have been persuaded to pay the way, we wouldn’t have had much time for frolicking in the sand or snow before returning to class schedules.
But lest you think we were totally deprived, some professors did arrange biology and geology fieldtrips at Eastertide that took us as far as Oklahoma, New Mexico, and even to the beaches of South Texas! Although it is true we were chaperoned by professor and sometimes spouse, and our accomodations were inexpensive motels equipped with cook-in facilities, and true too, that we were allowed no all night, or even late night, carousing and unlimited drink, I don’t recall feeling inhibited or deprived. I even think we had “fun.” The beaches we walked on Padre and Mustang Islands were all but devoid of human life, but we somehow found solace and satisfaction in the rhythm of waves spilling up on a clean beach occasioned by skittering ghost crabs and curious sandpipers. We might even have found it good.
It seems to me that the whole concept of “break” has been reordered over the years. Time and locus and method are all different now. Somewhere along the way, longer time-outs became desirable and resort sorties became the vogue. Parents appear to have become more prosperous and permissive and, if you take what is written in the paper as so, you can see that a good time is not to be had without tripping, trysting, and tippling.
If we have progressed (?) this far from 1950 to 1990, where might the college student of 2010 be headed on break — for Christmas in Spain, skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean, or maybe all-night moveable feasts criss-crossing the Continent? And maybe in yet another score of years, will there be months’-long trips to the moon for crater parties?
Meanwhile, in the timeless words of one poet, “time isn’t off, it’s always on, and I must hurry before it’s gone.”
©1990 Joan Hewatt Swaim