‘It’s that time of year again’

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Many years ago, I worked with an otherwise excellent journalist whose main failing came in the form of the lede: “It’s that time of year again.” For real, this reporter would write, “It’s that time of year again,” at the top of every story related to anything that occurred on an annual basis — from Christmas to (appropriately) Groundhog Day. It got to be that every time of year was “that time of year again,” which, if you think about it, is always true until it isn’t, meaning you’re dead.

As that reporter’s former editor, this phrase haunts me for the number of times I’ve murdered it before it hit the page. Yet, I found myself tempted to clack out, “It’s that time of year again,” on the keyboard when I reckoned I’d write about my kids going back to school on a recent Tuesday morning.

Indeed, it is that time of year again.

While once I became annoyed when my erstwhile reporter would file another dispatch from that time of year (again), the notion has grown on me as a sort of weary comfort — especially with regards to the beginning of school.

There are so many regular occurrences that frankly suck. In my experience, from doctor visits to weekly deadlines, most of them do. Even thinking about the juggernaut of daily obligation is depressing. But that’s not how I feel about back-to-school time, which I guess is weird according to some people and kind of paradoxical, considering how much I loathe repetition in so many other facets of daily life. 

Maybe it’s a form of seasonal affective disorder. To me, when summer happens, “it’s that time of year again” means too many people with too much time on their hands doing too many things too often and being generally exhausting while getting in the way of all the other things I have to do. When school starts, “it’s that time of year again” means it’s time to get back to business. 

Bed times are solidified, mornings are subject to a schedule and everyone is generally productive. Even better, the town ceases being an amusement park for a few months.

Then again, maybe it’s the difference between routine and ritual. Much has been written about the distinction between those phenomena. Maria Popova, who runs the stellar culture and philosophy website themarginalian.com, published an article in 2015 exploring the notion popularized in the early days of modern psychology that habits are critical to creating meaning in human life.

Describing routine and ritual as the “supreme deities of habit,” Popova wrote, “while routine aims to make the chaos of everyday life more containable and controllable, ritual aims to imbue the mundane with an element of the magical. The structure of routine comforts us, and the specialness of ritual vitalizes us.”

That’s about as good a perspective as I can find to illustrate how I feel when it’s “that time of year again.” The simple actions of getting everyone out of bed, clothed, brushed, combed, shod and out the door are things we do all the time, but when performed in service of getting to school on time (especially on the first day), they’re elevated to a higher purpose. 

Then there’s my favorite ritual: the first-day-of-school photos on the front porch, with which parents fill everyone’s social media feeds and, at least for a few blissful hours, crowd out the mundane noise of the world with images of hopeful kids headed out to be their best.

I take one of those photos, too, then text it to my folks, share it on Facebook and set it as the wallpaper on my phone, where it will stay until the next first day of school. 

Every couple of months during the following year, I’ll go back and look through all those previous first-day-of-school pictures and feel the sad sweetness every parent knows: just how fast the time goes before it’s “that time of year again.”