Life Matters: School Supplies

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The summer before my oldest child started Kindergarten his school sent us a list of supplies to bring with him on his first day of school. I studied the list and copiously followed its instructions. Securing the specific supplies made it necessary for me to make trips to multiple stores. It seems that while our grocery store carried things like gallon-sized, easy-zip plastic bags and boxes of 250-count, white tissues I had to look elsewhere for the more elusive jumbo glue sticks and dry erase board cleaner. My five year old and I etched his initials on every item he took to school and packed them in grocery bags. On his first day of school he looked like a pack mule.

Since I was a gung-ho volunteer back then, I signed up to help out in the Kindergarten classroom one day a week.  It didn’t take me long to observe that my nitpicky care in gathering supplies was thrown to the wind. Pencils, crayons and markers were dumped into community pots and in a few weeks’ time the supplies became a motley assortment of broken pencil nubs, dried out markers with missing caps and opened glue bottles that bled over everything nearby. None of the supplies came home; they couldn’t be separated back to their rightful owners and were in a shape too terrible to return.

In second grade the school added antibacterial wipes to their lengthly list so the students could clean their own desks off every day. I had become somewhat jaded by then and splurged for one container. I figured the school could come up with a better solution – like a custodian.

I wasn’t sure what a fourth grader needed with five different colored highlighters and three sizes of sticky notes. I sent one yellow highlighter and one sticky note pad. There weren’t any negative repercussions and I scored a small victory over THE LIST.

The years progressed like a Chinese calendar with every year being known for a different item only instead of the year of the rat or the dog, we had the year of the $85 graphing calculator, the year of USB memory card on a lanyard and the year of color-coded classes.

“Mom,” my son told me, “I need a blue notebook, blue highlighter, blue folder, blue pen and blue book cover for this class. For this class I need yellow, but they don’t make yellow ink pens…”

I surveyed our supply cabinet. “Here’s black. Your teachers will live,” I told him. And they did.

This past summer I played hardball. I walked brazenly past the half-wall of supply lists at Walmart without picking one up for the school district I live in. I purposely avoided the back-to-school aisles and told my kids I wasn’t buying so much as a packet of paper until I received all of their teachers’ class syllabuses. But I discovered that high school is a whole new animal. Read: light and disposable. Evidently the life of a modern-day high school student is unencumbered.

“Do you need anything for school?” I asked my son. He pulled a mechanical pencil out of his back pocket and wagged it at me.

“What about locker shelves or a stainless steel water bottle?”

He rolled his eyes up and thought a moment. “I could use some hair gel,” he said. “But nothing too smelly.” He started to walk away and stopped, “Oh. And don’t write my name on anything, okay Mom?”

“Right-O. Complete anonymity it is.” I smirked at him.

At 0-dark thirty the following morning I packed my son’s inconspicuous lunch in a plain, brown lunch sack. I followed his wishes not to pack anything too smelly (like a tuna sandwich) or anything that would leave his fingers discolored (like cheesy puffs) or anything that would stick in his teeth (like fruity chews). It was the perfect lunch for a John Doe.  And it made me almost long for the years of color-coding and initials on every crayon.

Just before he left the house I had a wild thought.  I tucked a note into his lunch bag. It was worded just elusively enough so that it would never be cause for public embarrassment if it fell into the wrong hands. My son never said a word about it.

A week later I carried clean laundry into my son’s room and plopped it onto his desk. Something tucked into the corner of his desk blotter caught my eye and I saw it was the note I had put into his lunch bag.

“Dear You,” it read. “Have a great day. Hugs, Mom.”

I smiled. I guess there is one ‘school supply’ you never outgrow.