I always marked off my childhood summers according to clearly delineated dates. The countdown to getting out of school started at Memorial Day, and then a couple of weeks later, school let out, and we always had a half day on the last day, and after a few hours of our crazed pre-vacation bouncing off the walls pushed her to the outer limits of her patience, our teacher would throw up her hands and send us out to the playground to burn it off, and then our moms would pick us up, and my mom always let me settle into the front seat before suggesting with studied casualness that we go to Terry’s Lunch for grilled cheese, and I’d yell, “Yeah!” Ma reserved Terry’s Lunch for special occasions like school vacations or birthdays or the survival of a nasty orthodontic procedure without excessive complaining, that sort of thing, and I always ordered the same meal: a gooey grilled cheese on white bread with crinkle fries, and a root beer. For the next couple of weeks, I would luxuriate in the sinfulness of getting to stay home and wait impatiently for the pool to open (I went to a private school, so we started summer vacation in the beginning of June) while pointedly ignoring my summer-reading list. At the end of June, the pool finally opened with weekday hours, and I would reunite with my “pool friends,” whom I literally never saw during the school year, and we would hone our diving-for-pennies-and-barrettes technique in the deep end. Next up, the Fourth of July, which I usually wanted to pass quickly, or get rained out, because back in the day before excessive music blasting had blunted my hearing, I had really sensitive ears and I hated the loud explosions of the fireworks. My father’s birthday in the middle of July denoted the exact middle of summer (and, as my father’s birthday gift, the successful completion of yet another lumpy summer-arts-camp ashtray that looked remarkably like fake dog poo). In August, the family went on vacation for a few weeks, usually to Cape Cod or down the shore, and then we’d come home and celebrate my parents’ anniversary and my brother’s birthday at the end of the month, and my brother’s birthday meant the beginning of the end. I would lie in bed, unable to sleep, and listen to the crickets and think to myself, “Exactly six days, eleven hours, and four minutes before I have to go back to school.” Then I’d get that fizzy feeling in my stomach and I’d try to think about something else besides my mother coming into my room the first morning of school and singing, “School days, school days, dear old golden ruuuuule daaaaays,” all happy because she had the house to herself again for at least a few hours.

I liked school well enough, and by the end of August I’d usually gotten pretty bored anyway (not to mention utterly fed up with my little brother, who had gotten even more bored than I because he didn’t like to read and sent the needle on Pest-O-Meter into the red zone as a result). But I skipped second grade, and every year after that up until I started college, I cherished a secret fear that they’d made a big mistake in deciding to skip me, and that this would be the year when I’d finally fail in a spectacularly humiliating fashion and have to repeat a grade. This would be the year when my vocabulary finally deserted me, when I finally got left in the dust by my classmates trying to finish my stupid SRA assignment, when I finally had to meet Satan behind the log cabin next to the seesaw and give up my soul in exchange for a passing grade in long division. Every new school year saw me in homeroom, sitting rigid with terror at my desk in my first-day-of-school outfit, oblivious to the welcome-back-what’d-you-do-this-summer-check-out-my-unicorn-Trapper-Keeper din around me and to the intense sweatiness and itchiness of the first-day-of-school wool skirt that I’d insisted on wearing despite the fact that the weather wouldn’t differ much from the last-day-of-summer weather of yesterday, waiting for the inevitable approach of my teacher from last year and her pitying smile as she said, “Sarah, please come with me – you don’t belong here,” and just when I’d entered the height of my anxiety attack and started coming up with ways to tie myself to my desk with my shoelaces, the teacher would come around with a swaying stack of the despised Warriner’s grammar books, and I’d take one off the top of the stack with a trembling hand and crack it open to the front and write my name on the flap, and then I’d close it and turn it sideways and write my name along the pages on the side and along the top and bottom, and then I’d open it again and smell it, inhaling the razor-sharp smell of glue and new pages, and I’d leaf through it and calm down a bit, telling myself, “Okay, participles, predicate adjectives, you know these things, you can fool them until at least October with this stuff,” and the teacher came around with more books, and I repeated my ritual with my name on each book and grumbled with the girl next to me about how paralyzingly boring the Social Studies unit looked this year and how we didn’t see why we had to learn about Eskimos since we seriously doubted that Eskimos had to sit through a “learning capsule” on the culture of New Jersey, and our teacher would overhear us and snap that perhaps we’d like to repeat the Leni Lenape Indian lessons from last year, and we’d quickly say, “No, that’s okay,” and pipe down, and the girl next to me would whisper, “If the Leni Lenape were so great, how come they got killed off like ten minutes after the white man landed in the new world?” and I’d get a fit of the giggles and forget all about my imminent transfer to special ed, at least until we got our first homework assignment, which inevitably seemed draconian and involved some obscure element of whooping-crane behavior or polishing off the more boring chapters of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.

In spite of my very real belief that I would get punted back to kindergarten after the inaugural math lesson each year, I always loved the shopping part of back-to-school. First stop: clothing. My mother loathed clothes shopping, since she had to monitor which rack my brother had disappeared under with action figures while at the same time contending with my paranoia that various outfits made me look “like a baby – I’m not a baby anymore, Ma!” and trying to talk me out of wandering over to the junior-miss department and getting a bunch of ideas in my head. At some point during the shopping trip each year, we had to have The Make-Up Conversation, which annoyed both of us, Ma because I’d started asking to wear lipstick when I turned five, and me because she kept saying no except for Halloween – “Ma? Now that I’m in fourth grade -” “No.” “Ma? Now, that I’m in fifth grade -” “No.” “Ma? Now that I’m a sixth grader, and since you did say I could wear some nail polish sometimes now -” “No.” – and then Mr. Stupidhead would pipe up from the back seat, “What’re you guys talking about?” “Sarah wants to know whether she can wear make-up, and I have said no.” “Of course.” “Sarah. Enough.” “Can I wear make-up?” “No, honey, boys don’t wear make-up.” “Yes they do, I saw on MTV. That Ant man wears make-up.” “And when did you watch MTV? Sarah? When did your brother watch MTV, a channel you are not permitted to watch but which someone has clearly been watching?” “How should I know, I’m not the boss of him.” “Mommy, I want to wear make-up too.” “Nobody in this family is wearing make-up!” “What about you, Mom?” “The kid’s got a point.” “You know, I thought we’d go to Terry’s Lunch, but now I think maybe we should just go home.” “Okay, we’ll shut up! Right, Sar?” “Yep. Shutting up now.” “I thought so.”

“Mom?” “What.” “Could Dad wear make-up if he wanted?” “Shut up, brat! We’re not going to get to go to lunch now!” “You shut up, Sar! Mom, tell Sar not to tell me to shut up. Hey, what’s so funny up there?”

After lunch, which took a while to finish eating because my mother and I kept bursting into peals of laughter at the thought of my father – whose idea of “glam” is getting a pair of Rockports in oxblood instead of brown – kitted out in curled eyelashes and Avon Rum Raisin, we headed across the street to Walk Well to buy shoes. I got a couple of pairs of school shoes and a new pair of patent leather Sunday-school shoes each year, and even at that tender age, I loved the shoe store: the dark scent of leather; the attentive salesmen brandishing the foot measurement doodad and exclaiming over how much my feet had grown in a year; the carousel horses in the kids’ section that we could pretend to ride. Every year, I debated whether I had gotten too old to ask for a balloon, and every year, I made up my mind to wait until a salesman offered me a balloon, but every year, I wound up taking the balloon. The night before school started, the balloon deflated peaceably in a corner of my room while I picked out an outfit to wear the next day. As I mentioned before, I inevitably selected something woolly and better suited to November, and my mother inevitably tried to get me to see the reality of early September in New Jersey (i.e. temperatures in the mid-eighties with matching humidity), but I would have none of that – I wanted to wear new clothes, period.

Important shopping remained, but we waited until the afternoon of the first day of school to do it, because I wouldn’t know exactly which school supplies I’d need and I wouldn’t know what kind of school bag to pester Ma to buy for me until I’d clapped an eye on my friends’ choices. Pastel parachute material? Primary-colored canvas? Cartoon characters? A giant Le Bag, roomy enough for five notebooks, twelve textbooks, a gross of uncapped chewed-on Bic Stics, a crushed Hostess fruit pie, a grotty Thermos, and the dented Band-Aid box holding my Chinese checkers? A messenger bag? A backpack? And if so, what kind of backpack? Using last year’s bag wasn’t an option, partly because I agitated fiercely for the latest thing in book-carrying but mostly because, after getting stuffed into lockers and slammed in car doors and slung under desks and dropped on driveways and dragged up flights of stairs and whipped at classmates and sat on during field trips and chucked into back seats and kicked by the Tuesday-Friday carpool mom’s four-year-old, the average student’s bag looks like it got run through a combine by the time Easter break rolls around. My mother often let me get two bags, and when the first one gave up the ghost in March, I subbed in the other one, but still, I had to choose carefully, because I couldn’t change my mind after two weeks and ask for another.

That’s why I liked buying school supplies best, I think – nobody at my school really cared about the notebooks and pencils others bought. I pretended they did, the better to emotional-blackmail my mother into buying me Garfield pencils instead of plain yellow ones and pencil cases with horses on them that I didn’t really need, but my mother basically let me go hog-wild with the school supplies anyway (except for spiral notebooks, which my parents didn’t believe in because they “looked messy”). Pencils, erasable pens, ballpoints, felt tips, narrow-ruled paper, wide-ruled paper, copybooks, reinforcements, mini-staplers, regular staplers, single and three-hole punches, rulers, protractors, compasses, notepads, battery-powered pocked-sized pencil sharpeners, folders, tabbed dividers, construction paper, blotter paper, animal-shaped erasers, highlighters, Sharpies, rubber cement (the flicked trajectory of choice when rolled between the fingers), pencil grippers that smelled like candy, markers that smelled like booze, glue and scissors and binders in every color of the rainbow – I swept entire shelves into our shopping cart. Each year on the night of the first day of school, I spent a happily productive evening sharpening pencils, writing my name on binders and filling them with paper, and painstakingly labeling the dividers in each one.

School supplies still reign as my favorite part of autumn, even though I don’t go to school anymore; I can’t resist the back-to-school displays. I have at least twenty notebooks at home, but I want more. I never need to buy another pencil in my life, so many have I stolen from bowling alleys and work supply cabinets, but when I see the virgin graphite in a neat little row, I can’t refrain from buying a pack. I try not to go to Staples unless I absolutely need to, because I walk in intending to buy a single printer cartridge, but I walk out with three huge bags full of gel-rollerball pens and poster paints and ink stamps and sparkly push pins and note cards a giant relief map of the United States and Canada. I mean, what on earth does a twenty-seven-year-old Webmistress need with poster paints? I barely have room for a poster in this apartment, much less room to paint one. I do not need more pens; I do not need more ink stamps. The note cards, okay – that’s genetic, because my father writes everything on note cards. But I never need to buy another push pin as long as I live. That won’t stop me, though. Hey, I think I’ll hit Staples.com after I finish writing this. I’ve used these file folders for a whole three months now and I obviously need some new ones and my blue ink stamp is getting a bit dry, I think and why not get a wall calendar and a set of colored pencils to plan for the MBTV season next year? And if I get colored pencils, I’ll need a new sharpener and a couple of those fat pink erasers okay, I’ve got to go now. See you next week

Come to the light!

Whee!

Where I used to go each year on the first day of school. (Nice typo on the homepage, eh?)

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