Singing the School Supply Blues

By DENISE ADAMS

The first day of school is coming soon, and the time has come for one of the most treacherous shopping expeditions parents face. It's worse than scouring the racks for reasonably priced, yet affordable, back-to-school clothes and infinitely more dangerous than fighting the angry mob in the tennis shoe department.

It's the gauntlet trip down Aisle No. 4 - the school supply aisle.

Our local PTA organization sells pre-packaged school supplies at a very reasonable price, but I foolishly thought I'd save time and money by purchasing the items myself at a local discount store.

Three days before school started, we headed to the store, and had to park a half mile from the entrance. Taped on the glass doors were giant posters and signs proclaiming they were hosting a gigantic, not-to-be-missed back-to-school sale, and it seemed every parent in a 50-mile radius was there, determined not to miss the bargains.

Pasted on the floor were green neon footsteps, promising to take us to the promised land of manila folders and yellow highlighters. Like the mesmerized rats that blindly followed the Pied Piper of Hamlin, we followed those glow-in-the-dark footsteps, turned a corner and found ourselves on the loudest, most crowded aisle I've ever faced in my life.

Undaunted, I took our school's list out of my purse, and for the first time, really looked at it. Gone was the simple checklist of my youth - loose leaf paper, three No. 2 pencils and a wooden ruler. The modern school supply list has mutated.

Forget a plain-Jane spiral notebook. Now it's got to be a three-subject, wide-lined, three-hole punched spiral bound notebook with a one-inch margin, light blue lines and a built-in folder for letters inside the front and back covers. They also want the notebook to have a planner, five-year calendar, a dictionary and a list of the state capitols.

Schools require a metric ruler, and this store only carries the inches kind. Besides, ruler manufacturers don't have room for metric measurements because they're squeezing the advertising banner for the Anime cartoons or Spongebob Squarepants all over the front of the stick.

You think plain No. 2 pencils are acceptable? Think again. Those simple writing utensils, the same color as the school buses, have met the same fate as antiquated inkwells and obsolete slide rules. Modern students use disposable mechanical pencils that come in an assortment of neon colors or jungle prints. Some of them are even scented.

Even if you do find the plain pencils, you can't tell what number they are because there's no room for that designation. Pencils are now hand-held billboards for the National Football League, the latest action figures and candy bars.

This year, we lucked out - no crayons. The school list usually specifies "one box of eight crayons," but there's always one smug mom who buys her darling child a box with 2,000 colors that plays the "Star Wars" theme every time her child opens the box.

And a dinky, eight-color box is supposed to compete with that? After two hours of elbowing and stepping on the feet of at least a dozen moms, my boys and I got almost everything on the list, and headed to the front of the store to the check-out line. As we looked over the list, I discovered we were missing one item - a pencil with red on one end and blue on the other. I told the boys not to worry - I'm sure I could fine one anywhere. I was wrong.

For the next three days, I searched high and low on every school and office supply shelf in town. They had plenty of red pencils and I could buy a whole box of colored pencils and just use the blue one, but no two-headed pencil.

I lucked up on a late-night run to the grocery store the day before school. It had become second nature to scour the school supply racks for supplies, and tucked behind an orphaned package of pencils was one already opened package containing this elusive pencil. I snatched it up as if it were gold. On my way to the check-out counter, I passed a weary woman who was shuffling along in her house slippers muttering, "Whoever heard of a red and blue pencil…"

I've learned my lesson. Next year, I'm going to throw myself on the mercy of the PTA where I'll be the first one in line at their summer school supply sale. I don't care how much it costs; there is no way I'm going to spend my entire summer looking for a red and blue pencil. I don't care if that package is $50 - it's worth every penny to avoid the school supply stampede.

Denise Adams is a weekly columnist with The Herald-Coaster newspaper in Rosenberg, Texas and can be reached via e-mail at dhadams@herald-coaster.com.