First Days

I haven't stepped foot in a classroom for the purpose of formal learning and lecture in almost fifteen years, and yet when August entered its final, hazy days a month ago, I settled into a familiar state. It's a state that I've returned to during each late summer that has passed since my college graduation. It's a state filled with thoughts of and longing for notebooks and a rainbow array of pens and carefully curated, first day outfits meant to impress.

I had an odd loathing for summer as a child. It wasn't only the sticky heat that caused me distress. I also desperately missed school. You could find me at high noon on a Saturday in mid-July laying flat on my back in bed with my eyes closed as hard as I could manage and wishing for the next six weeks to slide away and disappear. Sometimes I would mix it up and turn over onto my belly, forehead against forearm, hoping for the impossible. I outgrew this behavior around the age of 12 but never became exactly comfortable with summer and the freedom that came with it. It's no surprise that I'm still left flat-footed when offered unstructured time that could be used, if I were the type of person who enjoyed such a thing, for hours of leisure.

There are other types of freedom that I've never had trouble exploring to the fullest. When I was set loose from the confines of my Catholic school uniform, free finally (on the days I chose to be) from starched white shirts and pleated plaid skirts, I spent a lot of that summertime freedom focusing on all of the things I would wear once school was back in session.

In my mind, it feels like I must have written numerous pieces on my mother's negative feelings about and disinterest in my former dreams of a career in fashion. But as I look back, there's only the one published on the eve of my 30th birthday. I speak of her distaste sometimes, mostly in passing and often laced with a joke. And I think about it a lot as it is so intertwined with the disappointment I know she feels about the path my life has taken. It's this final piece that likely explains my confusion. I've written whole tomes in my head about the ways in which I've let her down.

Her attitude about this facet of my personality has always left me wondering what exactly she expected of the child who spent most of the summer of 1994 carefully planning a purple and white ensemble for her first day of sixth grade. After all this was also the child who was in love with lace-trimmed socks worn with Mary Janes and became briefly obsessed with the printed fans one could find at little shops throughout Boston's Chinatown. The one who insisted that the day printed on her Day of the Week underwear always aligned with the actual day of the week and carefully slotted the shiniest pennies she could find into her brown loafers.

The one who wore a seersucker suit to her birthday dinner and asked to be made a gold lamé dress for a New Year's Eve trip to the Boston Pops.

White. Purple. White. Purple. That was the pattern I settled on in the original conception of this Very Important outfit. I was foiled in the execution by the fact that there were no purple Keds to be found in the Greater Boston area, so I pivoted to a white pair worn with purple socks that I scrunched as hard as they could be scrunched. 11-year-old Samantha was as persnickety then as 36-year-old Samantha is now and so was greatly disappointed by this deviation from the plan, but I walked into my school's red doors as close to perfect as I could manage, a stark white tee worn with a pleated purple skirt from Limited Too. Around my neck was a pendant necklace from the same store, a thick black cord with a flower made of clay in shades of purple, yellow, and orange hanging from it.

The previous year I sat in a purple dress with little pink flowers scattered on it and pink tights on my legs surrounded by my classmates as the annual school-wide picture was taken. It takes work to get 400 girls from the ages of 10 to 17 and all of their teachers and various administrators settled in for a group picture, especially on that first day with the last of the summer cobwebs yet to clear away. The youngest girls were always seated cross-legged on the ground in front filled with nervous anxiety about this new beginning while the oldest stood on the highest riser thinking about the coming end of this chapter.

It was no coincidence that I wore purple on those two first days at this new school. It was my favorite color for much of my childhood, a perfect mix of hot and cold. My obsession with and love for it might explain why my mother is confused by the navy and gray adult that I've become. I lived within a whirlwind of color and print back then before moving to invisibility through trend obsession to preppiness and finally to this neutral chic that causes her to screw up her face.

And yet in that 11-year-old and all of her colors and all of her prints and that last gasp of a fascination with hats lived all of the pieces that explain how the 36-year-old dresses now. The planning. The precision. The need to impress others but mostly to impress myself. The delight at having a special occasion that calls for, at least in my mind, an entirely new look. I have found all sorts of ways in my adulthood to replace the thrill of dressing for those first days of school. My birthday party and the birthday parties of others. Weddings and baby showers. The first truly brisk day of fall and the first truly hot day of summer. I mark events big and small and life-changing with new outfits. Not all of such events or even a quarter of them but enough to fill myself with that childlike giddiness once more.

Then I stand in front of my closet as I prepare to put on the chosen outfit for the first time and think "today is your day."