After many months of plague induced recess, it’s back-to-school time for many, myself included. This August is going to be a bit different than most Augusts any of us can recollect. Unless you were around during the Spanish Flu of 1918, which if you were, your recollection ability may be a bit compromised. Being 130-years old, or dead, does that.

Many people have put in many hours over the past months to prepare, as much as one can prepare, to open up the schools again in as safe a manner as possible. At least as safe a manner as our current understanding of the situation allows for. We may be right, we may be wrong, only time will tell.

As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Many have done “something”, many have put themselves into “the arena”, and, as is most always the case, some have done nothing but criticize the actions of those doing the work. Simply running one’s mouth is simple. I guess it is “doing something”, but it’s rarely doing something useful.

Back to Teddy, our adopted son of the Dakotas, and his famous Citizenship in a Republic speech, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man (and woman) who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

I thank those that have spent much of the past months in the arena. Doing what needs to be done, so that parents who never intended on being in charge of their child’s ability to comprehend mathematics can go back to basic parental duties.

Things like replacing the cardboard tube with a new roll of toilet paper, not putting an empty milk carton back in the fridge, noticing you have dog crap on your shoes before walking through the house. Run of the mill parenting things. Things that were in the “Stuff You’ll Need to Relentlessly Harp on Your Kids About” parenting manual.

I’m fairly certain that there isn’t a mask large enough to contain the smiles of parents dropping their kids off at school this year.

We don’t know what the coming months are going to bring, we never actually knew, but we used to have a fairly close proximity to the general way of things. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but as John Wooden once said, “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” So it goes.