Summer Begins
By Stuart Grauer

The dream arrived first, quiet and strange, the kind you are not sure if you are awake or dreaming. Theta state. I wrote it down, thinking it was simply a school allegory that I live with. Then, just one day later, I sat through our music class final exam making notes and the dream was all right there.  

The two moments felt like an almost absurdly literal pairing, or syncopation.

Here are both accounts—one in sleep, one in song and gathering. What ties them together is up to you.

1. The Dream

Once upon a time, at least a while back, there was a teacher. The students said he was warm. Wise. Cool. Whatever. The kind of teacher you don’t forget unless your memory was broken or your soul hurt too much at that time.

He wasn’t necessarily a teacher, though he had the credentials and was hired. Maybe he was more like a conjurer. Or a sensei. Or maybe a village idiot who knew how to start a fire by staring at wet wood until it combusted out of embarrassment. Okay, not that.

He taught with questions or requests. Like:

•  "What would Odysseus do if he were a girl named Mia in Detroit?"
• "Is zero a number, or a polite fiction?"
• "How are we going to play that song if we lost the strings?"

You get the picture. It was just a dream.

At first, the dream students looked to him in pure observation, like cats watching a laser pointer. But as the year wandered forward—because school years don’t march—he stopped saying so much. He’d open the day with a question like “What do you need today?” sip coffee, maybe raise an eyebrow, then vanish into the folds of the classroom like a monk into a robe. Some quiet students started speaking and writing more, in vaguely related fragments, and he called them the poets or mystics. Some of them overflowed in expressions, and some in rules or expectations. They were all emergent identities.

By spring, the center of the classroom was like a little, open field. Sometimes literal—he would move class outside, maybe with flowers near and the students formed pods of three or five or one big circle. He hardly needed to be there and they loved needing him there but were letting go of that need.

Then he wasn’t there one day. The students meandered into the room and found places, and sat, quietly. There was a question on the board. Something like: "What would we do if the teacher never came back?"

It didn’t matter. The kids showed up, waited five minutes, shrugged and looked around. Should they just leave? Someone said, “Let’s talk about it.” They were already in small, accidental groups that no one had assigned.

So they talked. Like ants, or philosophers. Like any other day. Some got deep. Some went off-topic and came back around. One kid started crying—nobody laughed. They knew something was happening, in some way owing to the teacher.

Somewhere, probably, the teacher sat under a tree eating an apple or something and wondering how it had all turned out, though he had a good sense of it.

That’s the dream.

Music Final Exams at The Grauer School – June 3, 2025

“Go and love yourself,” the opening Justin Bieber number sung by middle school girls, rings out. A few students shift nervously in their seats, gearing up for their turn.

Oliver steps up with his guitar while Tom Hopper, the music teacher, cues a backing track. “Here we go, brother, play a little,” Tom says.

“Where’s the capo?” “Where’s the electric-acoustic?” These questions bounce around the room and are resolved by the students themselves, who also accompany one another’s featured songs.

Eventually the performances are running themselves and Isaac Langen, the Arts Department Chair, settles in the back and says, “Hey, I’m just going to sit back here and let you guys set it up.”

Tom is manning the soundboard, turning knobs and checking levels. “Hey, Ronin Bear,” he calls out, “play a little guitar, brother.”

Two musicians walk in carrying a big lunchbox labeled “Crack Shack.” It’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen in school, and also the most natural thing in the world—not like Sean Penn having his pizza delivered to class in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. They are not complying with or breaking rules, they are having real life.

A middle schooler starts a song on stage, but an older student gently interrupts: “That guitar’s not tuned.” He swaps it out and hands him another, then onward.

The song calls for backup singers. Without prompting, a few students around in the audience who know the chorus join in, as the middle schooler strums out the skeleton of the tune with musical support beyond what a seventh grader might imagine.

Julien, a junior, performs a song and adds some footwork he’s been working on. Afterward, he shows me (patiently) how to do it.

It’s not all pitch perfect. Sometimes the performers listen to the music. Sometimes, to their hearts. Sometimes both. So it’s pitch perfect.

Will sings Johnny Cash. Some of these kids who I remember mainly as middle schoolers now have baritones deeper than I will ever have, and a deep focus—whoa.

Bailey sings and plays piano, a song about finding a friend in a city of 18 million, with her brother accompanying on guitar. She doesn’t look stressed as she said she felt before class. This event—technically the final exam—is the very antidote to the anonymity she sings about. Afterward, he hugs her.

“It’s all because of you,” sing two middle school girls next. Scattered around the hall, other kids quietly mouth the lyrics. A few teachers have stopped by to take in the performances, but most of the audience is just students, all grades and identities mixed together like schools of yore.

The final song ends, and not much else ends anything; no chrysalis breaks open, but that’s what has happened. People mill about as though the main thing—whatever it is—is still going on. It’s like summer.

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