Link to Reflection on Ultimate Significance of school rubber raincoats

[joe]

It seems on appropriate on New Years Day that I share this about raincoats and the passage of time. I found it on newspapers.com. This is a superb reflection written by Wally Steffany of the Allentown, PA Morning Call from September 6, 1962:

The Roving Reporter . . . The World of Truth Wears a Yellow Oilskin

“Did you ever stop to think, Mom, how the whole wide world - your world and mine - and everybody's same old world wears a yellow oilskin raincoat on a rainy day? Everything that happens that is worth more than passing note in this old world, when you think about it quietly, can be wrapped up in either a yellow oilskin raincoat or a Little Red Riding Hood raincape, or both of them together. These are really only symbols and you probably have some of your own that are as good or better. But this is the back-to-school season and yellow oilskin raincoats and Red Riding Hood raincapes, marching off to the shouting yellow bus, sort of jump out as currently apropos symbols. Relax, Mom, sit back and kick off your shoes till you finish the morning paper. Leave the breakfast dishes for a while. You have finally got your own little yellow oilskin raincoat off in time to join the others, with no major mishap. Summer is over, for all practical nervous - system purposes, and thank goodness. If there are a lot of yellow oilskin raincoats of all sizes hanging in your raingear closet, wasn't it just a few months ago that you slumped into the same chair after the spring commencement program and recalled how that uncomfortable-looking mortar board and that broad-shouldered academic gown wore a Size 6 yellow oilskin raincoat themselves not too many years before? And now the season is repeating, all over again, as sure as summer follows spring and autumn follows summer. As sure as the seasons follow one another, as sure as day follows night and night replaces day again, as sure as kindergarten follows graduation, which follows kindergarten, the story never ends. It is the oldest story ever known in fact the only story ever told and it is as new as the price-tag you forgot to pull from inside the collar of the yellow oilskin raincoat yesterday. This Is the lengthening season of Pentecost, and this is the time of Rosh Hashanah. And presently will come Yom Kippur, and Christmas, and Passover and Easter, and spring and summer, and commencement and first grade. Every year, they repeat anew, and if you think about it even for a fleeting moment after the school bus leaves and before you tackle the breakfast dishes, Mom, you realize that nothing worth while is once and done. There are cycles on cycles of everything. All Eternity is in every year; in every day, in every moment. Yellow oilskin raincoats grow big and build bridges and practice law and dig ditches and sail ships and lead people. And grownup Red Riding Hood rain-capes beget yellow oilskin slickers and the seasons repeat. A juice - tanned wolfhide may have been the cavewoman's yellow oilskin slicker to watch, but she probably saw the same immeasurable moment of time in it. Bridges and skyscrapers rest on foundations made of lullabies, and a pair of scuffed-up, toe-curled sandals is a leather - bound volume of great poetry. And when it rains on opening day of school, the world of Truth wears a yellow oilskin raincoat.“