Back To School

Zach's big day is almost here! You know how much that boy loves school. Starting back in the morning...on a Friday no less.

Zach has grown up tremendously this summer and I think this will be his year to show what he is capable of. I took Massey to the orientation today at the high school, Zach declined our invitation to join us.

What is great about having them all in high school is the trip to buy supplies.

When they are in elementary and even middle school, they have a supply list two pages long. Many, many years they never used some of the items "required" on the list, I still have several three hole punches , compasses and boxes and boxes of markers and colored pencils.

Then they ask for every student to bring in a pack of copy paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, Kleenex and anything else they can think of.

When I was a kid on the first day of school they sent you home with a Silver Horse denim notebook (remember those?) Of course if you were younger it was a primer writing tablet with the blue and red lines...the red dashes in the middle line for writing upper case and lower case letters. They gave you a pack of pencils and a box of fat crayons. Now all they send you home with on the first day is another list of items to buy and enough information forms to fill out that make you think they may be sending your kids overseas for their education.

When I was a kid lunches were 25 cents. Now they are $2.00 and the amount of food is the same it was in the sixties when I was a kid.

When I was a kid the school nurse was a mother that volunteered to sit in the clinic. It got better in high school when you had that one mom volunteer in the clinic that would give you a note to check out, even if she knew that it was only because eight of your other friends had already checked out and were waiting in the parking lot so you could all pile into a beat up Ford and go to McDonald's to hang out with kids from other schools that had moms in their clinic as cool as yours!

I feel grateful that I was able to grow up in the carefree and easy years of the sixties and seventies.

When I was in elementary school, we had square dancing once a week. "Everybody go forward and back...forward again with a right hand swing and all the way back to the side of the ring."

Or how about "Well we all join hands and we circle a ring...then you stop where you are , give your honey a swing... swing that little gal behind ya" and we'd all be singing "Oh Johnny Oh Johnny Oh !!

From those days we supposedly matured enough by seventh grade to be safety patrols and cross the smaller kids across the street safely after school... and at the end of the year got to ride a train to Washington DC for a four day trip (two spent on the train.)

It was still a great life.

I'm not saying my kid's life isn't great...it is just a different kind of great.

I have diaries and journals from the time I was nine until well after the birth of my last child. I wouldn't trade those writings for anything in the world. It's kind of sad that all my writing has been replaced with typing on a keyboard and saving it on a computer. I still like to write...I mean with a pen! I am fastidious with my writing, even taking orders at work. It has to be written neatly with no scratch outs. If I have to scratch something out, once I leave the table I stop and re write the entire order before I put it into the computer at work .

One of my standing jokes with my tables is when they order one thing and then say "Can I change that ?" I always have a serious look on my face when I tell them..."No I am so sorry, but I am writing in pen."

Times have changed.

From pencils to pens to fonts to texting.

My grand kids will probably be catching rides to high school in their friend's Hover Crafts.

Til next time...COTTON