It’s late July, and that means…back-to school sales! 

 

Although I don’t yet have children, I still take advantage of the deals to stock up on office supplies for the year. (When else can you regularly buy notebooks for 20 cents or less a piece?) Meandering through the packed aisles at Target, I couldn’t help but smile at the children’s excitement as they selected their school supplies. I was pleasantly reminded of the back-to-school shopping trips I made as a child. And the high jinks my siblings and I got up to trying to bamboozle our mother in the process.

 

Shopping for new school supplies had to be near the top of our list of exciting things to do as a child, right behind Christmas, Thanksgiving, and summer break. (Actually going back to school was another matter.) But picking and choosing the pencils, crayons and notebooks we would take with us for the year was thrilling, particularly after the long, hot, sometimes boring days of summer had begun to pall. So, when Mom would herd us all into the van and set off for the stores in the next town over, we were bubbling with anticipation. 

 

Skipping into the air-conditioned store, a somewhat rare treat in my early childhood—the A/C, not the skipping—our swindling tactics would already begin. 

 

“Don’t you think Mrs. T___ would want me to have markers, too?” I would ask after scanning the list of supplies for my grade level. 

 

“You know, Mom, my tennis shoes have been feeling a little tight. Don’t you think I need a pair of (style of the moment)?” my brother would say. 

 

I can still hear Mom sigh.

 

Our eyes would grow large as we entered the area of the store set up with large, bright back-to-school displays. Ignoring Mom’s commands, we would scatter in different directions while she tried to follow in our wake, checking off items on our perspective lists as they were tossed in the shopping cart. She would steer us toward the plain, solid folders and let us choose our colors, while we tried to convince her why we needed a folder with He-man or Care Bear plastered across the cover instead. The same went for pencils. Who wanted those ugly golden yellow ones when you could have sparkles or your favorite sports team? Mom wasn’t a scrooge. She usually let us each choose one folder with a picture on it and one pencil that was more decorative, but we always pushed for more. 

 

Then it came time for the drama over crayons. We never wanted the cheap generic brand. They never worked as well—the colors were dull and they felt waxy in your hands—so we would beg and plead until we got Crayola. But, being in different grade levels, each of our lists specified a different number of colors, and the younger you were the more unfair it was. Still, we tried to upgrade. If the list called for a box of 8 crayons, we wanted 16. If 16, then 24. If 24, then 32.   

 

And, oh, that great, glorious box of 64 colors! Year after year, we begged Mom to let us buy the jumbo box, and no veteran salesman could have been more convincing. 

 

“Look, it has a crayon sharper built into the back of the box. Isn’t that smart?”

 

“Oh, I’ll be certain to make the best art projects with all of these colors.” 

 

“I can use them to create homemade birthday cards, so you won’t need to buy any.”

 

The same went for markers. And every year we all wanted new backpacks, even if the one from the year before still worked perfectly well. 

 

Then there was always the sibling who was too young to attend school yet who felt left out. (And with 6 kids, it seemed like there was always someone who was still too young.) By the end of the day, the youngest would be in tears, along with at least one of us who were school-aged and didn’t get their way. My mother was either frazzled or angry. And one of my brothers would take it upon themselves to badger everyone else, just to make sure we were all in bad moods by the time we climbed back into our van, which now felt like an oven inside after the store’s A/C.  

 

However, when we got home, Mom would let us dump out the supplies on our dining room table and then fill our perspective pencil boxes and backpacks, be they old or new, with our supplies for the new year. By the end, we were all smiling again, and eager to put our loot to good use. Which, of course, led to another argument, since we weren’t supposed to use our new supplies until we actually returned to school. (Sigh) But, that’s how it goes.