This afternoon, I heard my first "back to school" commercial of summer, and I remembered the very first time my mother and I had to shop for school supplies—right before I started first grade. The schools used to send out a list. I guess they still do, though I can't begin to imagine what's on it nowadays. Probably something like . . . "one laptop (Mac or PC) with air card, one iPod, one smart phone with minimal 300-minute package . . ." Things were considerably lower-tech back when I first donned that plaid jumper, laced up my Buster Browns, and headed off for the brave new world of School. Each kid was expected to show up with lined writing tablets (remember how rough the paper was and how awful they wrote?), plus jumbo pencils and a shoebox filled with the following: one pair of blunt-edge scissors (because you can tell kids not to run with them, but some of those little hooligans are bound to anyway, so best to minimize the blood loss); one jar of Elmer's paste (because we couldn't yet be trusted with Elmer's glue); one small jar of buttons (a counting aid that came in handy during the dark days before calculators); and one box of jumbo crayons. That very first day in Mrs. Fannie Hinds' class, I got seated next to Eddie Jackson. We noticed that we had the same color of blunt-edge scissors and took that as a sign that we should be friends. Mrs. Hinds was revered and beloved by all Shelby County schoolchildren AND their mothers. Because Eddie and I were raised right and well-behaved, she often selected us for the coveted job of collecting everybody's milk money, making an unsupervised journey to the lunchroom, and bringing back a crate filled with half-pints of Barber's chocolate milk and orangeade for the morning refreshment break. It was a heady taste of power and freedom for a couple of six-year-olds. We took our leadership roles very seriously and always came straight back, dawdling only long enough to make polite conversation with The Lunchroom Ladies. (As far as we elementary kids were concerned, The Lunchroom Ladies held some of the most important positions in the whole school, given their access to those peanut butter cookies we occasonally got as snacks.) Not too long ago, I was so happy to hear that a mutual friend had bumped into Eddie and his family at a wedding back home, and that they're doing well. I wonder if he remembers those shoeboxes—and the two long-ago first-graders who became fast friends, all because our mamas bought the same school supplies back in the fall of '68.
[Image by freerangestock.com]
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