I just reread last week’s blog. Wow. That was a real Debbie Downer. I can almost hear the collective Wah, wah, wahhh. Sorry about that. I was clearly not in a rainbows and unicorns state of mind. This week I’ll try to hold the despair. It was never my intent to have anyone feeling worse about their situation after reading a blog entitled ”Images of Hope”. Sometimes it is best just to look at the pretty pictures and not read the captions.
As the new week begins, we see the sun finally setting on summer. To some this may seem like an introduction to another blog where I lament about the end of something we all hold dear. On the contrary, my peculiar personality that has a love affair with the morning, actually sees the fall as the season of rebirth. I know, my internal time clock is 180 degrees out of phase. Just bear with me a second.
I am one of those strange people who actually looked forward to the first day of school. As I think that I have mentioned previously, I viewed the start of the school year as if I had 100% in every class. From my perspective, I had yet to lose any points on a test.
As a kid, the beginning of the school year meant two pairs of new shoes, a pair of “sneakers” and another pair of dress shoes. It also brought a shopping excursion to Sears and JCPenny where I was always walking the tight rope of trying to express my inner rebel without upsetting my mother. Believe me, when 99% of your classmates were shopping from the identical racks of clothes that you were looking at, it was incredibly hard to establish any amount of individualism.
The new school year also brought with it a trip to Woolworth’s for new school supplies. The crayons were sharp and had yet to have had the label peeled back. You could still open the bottle of Elmer’s glue before the tip became clogged. To this day, the smell of cedar emanating from the un-sharpened Ticonderoga #2 pencils still reminds me of school.
The first day as school also meant the distribution of your new text books. The first thing you always did was to see what student had inscribed their John Hancock on the back of the cover the year before. You always hoped it was a cool kid. More often than not, I ended up with a book from the kid that never took a shower or was always the first to be pelted with a ball to the head during dodgeball. It didn’t matter for long because I knew that I would be hiding my disappointment in a brand new cover carefully fabricated from a brown bag from Acme. I would try hard to keep that virgin cover free of doodles for as long as possible. I could usually only hold out for a week before the first boring lecture caused my inner Dali to adorn the blank space with some mind-numbing gibberish.
It has been roughly 40 years since I last walked to the bus stop, new shoes squeaking the entire way. However, when the humidity of the summer has been pushed away by the cool northerly winds, I hear the high school band practicing off in the distance. I am immediately transported back to having to look sharp for the first day of school. You never knew what new girl you might meet at the bus stop. More on that in a couple of weeks.
