Thursday, August 10, 2006

Returning to School

It is just a week away. A date that every kid and parent knows is coming. The kids and parents have very different reasons to anticipate this date. We all remember similar times in our childhoods. Of course I am talking about Fess Parker’s birthday. It is hard to believe that ‘Daniel Boone’ is 82 years old. (Remember how the only person on that show who spoke proper English grammar was a guy named Mingo.)
Okay, so Fess Parker’s birthday is not what every one is thinking about. It’s really Kathie Lee Gifford’s birthday. Sorry, I’ll get back on task. It is the beginning of a new school year.
The sense of anticipation has been mounting. Kids looking at the slow, inexorable lessening of summer days like a honey covered man watching the march of fire ants towards his feet. While, on the other hand, the parents countdown the days like a solitary confinement prisoner counting the days until his new issue of Redbook arrives in the mail. Maybe that’s a bad example, but you get the idea.
Thinking back to my own experiences as a kid it seemed there was less lead-in time. Nowadays, as soon as the Fourth of July has passed the stores start putting up their back-to-school advertisements. Since everything is now bottom line driven I guess it makes sense. The retail world limps from one minor annual event to the next hoping to make it to Christmas, the ultimate everyone-max-out-your-credit-card-making-Sam-Walton’s-family-just-that-much-richer occurrence. As a parent of three school age children I am pretty sure this is the second most check book exhaustive time of year.
School supplies have gotten much more complicated over the years. From the days of a Big Chief notebook (which consisted of seventy-five cents worth of newsprint bound together and topped off with cover art depicting a racially insensitive portrait of a Native American wearing a many feathered headdress) to a notebook personal computer (which consists of a thousand dollars of technology making it possible to surf the internet and find racially insensitive material that would make Archie Bunker cringe).
At the risk of sounding older than I wish to, when I was a kid I carried my books home, loose. I just made a stack with the three ring binder at the bottom, tucked them under my arm and carried them. Now kids need an ergonomically designed backpack made from a space age polymer equipped with special compartments for a cell phone, an I-pod, and with a built-in GPS device making it possible for parents to track them as they go to the mall instead of the library which is where they told their mother they were going in order to finish their report entitled “How Bovine Flatulence Effects Global Warming.” But, I was the guy who through the majority of his high school career carried his lunch to school in a black Ralph Kramden-like metal lunchbox, complete with a thermos in the lid, which my wife gleefully points out marked me as a nerd extraordinaire. So, I guess I am not the person to go to when it comes to figuring out the “right way” to outfit a student.
There are pleasant memories attached to the return to school. There is nothing quite so aesthetically pleasing as a brand new box of crayons. The pointy, but not sharp, pigment sticks standing in their perfect rows in the box with that distinctive smell. The smell which takes most everyone back to the time in their lives when art was best appreciated hung with magnets on a refrigerator and the birds and horses looked remarkably similar. I’m not talking about the boxes numbering into the hundreds, but just the ones whose color names are understood by anyone. Colors like: red and green and blue. Not colors with names too arcane for a five year old. How many kindergarteners remark they really wish their box had a periwinkle in order to capture the proper shade of their cat’s eyes? (There is “raw sienna” and “burnt sienna”. Is there “properly cooked so it reaches its optimum level of doneness” sienna?) As wonderful as a new crayon is the truly remarkable thing about crayons is you can break them cleanly in two and they still do their intended use as well as when they were pristine, just out of the box. What else can make such a claim? Try it with that multi-function calculator capable of figuring the square root of pi as well as the statistical likelihood Suri Cruise actually exists, or at least what chance she has to grow up without needing years of intensive psychotherapy. It won’t work.

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