Back to school

When I was a child, back-to-school was one of my favorite times of the year.

So was getting out of school for the summer — I wasn’t that unusual — but something about getting new notebooks and pens, getting to pick out folders with cute or cool pictures on them, to go with new crayons, erasers, paper and glue made me happy. New school supplies just had a different smell than the old, used up grubby ones.

And that doesn’t count, at the very least, new shoes, and some new clothes to go with them, and a new lunchbox and Thermos. One that still closed all the way and wasn’t permanently stained orange from the time I got SpaghettiOs in my lunch as a treat.

It was kind of like what Anne of Green Gables thought about waking up to a new day: It didn’t have any mistakes in it yet.

The mistakes would come, of course, but so would a lot of learning. I was generally good at school, the kind of smart that works well with writing and books and even sometimes math, and not very inclined to get into trouble. But learning itself implies starting with ignorance, and mistakes come with the territory.

We humans are always learning, or at least we should be, and that means that we always have areas of ignorance to learn about. Nobody knows everything.

I write this as our youngest is about to start high school, at a time when she is no longer particularly interested in my opinions of school supplies or clothing. Although I get a vote since I’m the one taking her shopping.

Truth be told, after years of Catholic elementary school uniforms, I’m not used to having to think about school clothes beyond whether we had enough polo shirts and if last year’s skirts were now too short. And for the last several years, we bought supplies through the school-approved vendor, who would have everything in her classroom before she even arrived.

It was helpful, to make sure she had the appropriate colors and styles of notebooks and folders. For what it’s worth, there were no folders with pictures of kittens or cartoon characters. It was also less expensive than buying everything from paper towels and Chlorox wipes to dry erase markers in one place, and easier than tracking sales across multiple stores.

This year? She’s been advised she’ll need pens and pencils and notebooks, and her teachers will tell her anything else when she gets there.

For my spreadsheet-making planner’s heart, that’s a little anxiety-inducing, especially since she’ll have so many other things to learn those first few days. But she’ll do it, I have no doubt. And I’ll learn to live with it.