The Moment

Day One: Back to School

By now the last of the summer vacations are memories, and most of America's 55 million schoolchildren have shouldered their backpacks like draft horses shrugging into harness. You wonder why the littler ones--like these kindergartners in Carlsbad, Calif., who started Aug. 18--don't topple over backward. (Are they cantilevered?) And what the heck do those teenagers have to be so moody about? Chillax!

Some folks measure their lives by the calendar, others by the changing weather or the steady march of seasons: baseball, football, basketball and so on. But a lot of us, first as children and later as parents, march to...

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