Happy New School Year

The Yorktown News View and the Schulemberg Sticker both published school supply list this week for returning students. What joy it gave me to read through the lists and remember how much I loved buying supplies for back to school. Spiral notebooks with their covers and pages clean. Ready to be filled with class notes, doodles and notes to friends when I should have been paying attention. The smell of No. 2 pencils being sharpened. Brand new colored pencils standing at attention in the yellow Crayola box.

One year my mother bought me a folder with a picture of Nadia Comaneci on the front doing a back bend on a balance beam. Oh how I coveted that folder. Unlike the others that sported stains and drawings, this one remained perfect the entire school year. In fact I saved it for years in my closet. Nothing it in just sitting on a shelf like a shrine.

School supplies embodied hope for a new beginning every year. It was a do over wrapped up in a three ring binder. This year I will make friends. This year I will try playing a sport. This year I will make all A’s. How could I fail with all of these tools at my disposal? Most school years ended the same. I didn’t make many new friends because I was too afraid to make the first move. I tried a couple of times to play a sport always with the same disastrous conclusion. As for the all A’s, never did happen until my fourth year of college. Still I look at these lists of school supplies for kids I will never know and I think how lucky they are to be getting a do over once again.