When you have kids sometimes you judge the seasons by the school year and so when I think that school is starting next week it feels to me that summer is over. Even though there are lots of warm days still ahead of us, somehow we’re thinking that there will be frost and possibly even snow within the next few weeks. A drive in the country shows that the tobacco harvest has started, some of the seed corn is starting to turn and the fruit is ripe on the trees.
I remember when I was a kid that our big day trip for the summer was to go to London to do our back to school shopping. There was a department store just south of 401 that we would go to and then we would go to the downtown mall on the corner of Wellington and York. It was the first of its kind, or so I thought. I always wondered why, when we went to the city that we had to pay ten cents to use the bathroom. Determined not to fall for that scam, I slid under the door. It makes me cringe now to think about that… Each year we got a new lunch pail which was a square metal box with some kind of design on it, new binders, paper and pens; usually bic pens because they were only nineteen cents each. We also got one new outfit to wear on the first day of school. Each year I promised myself to keep my notes more organized than the last year and each year I did just that…for about a month. There seems to be so much more for kids to learn now. I don’t know how kids are keeping up. I guess with all of the new knowledge comes new ways of learning and somehow it all works.
I’ve been getting kids ready for school now for 29 years and aside from making school lunches, those 29 years along with the 5 years that preceded them they have been the best years of my life. Like all of you, I’ve had peaks and valleys, I’ve made mistakes and learned, I’ve laughed and cried but in the end it’s been the most awesome experience that I could ever imagine. I’d do it all over again if I could. When we get together and the kids talk about the good times in their lives, they talk about the things that we did and not about material things. They talk about the games we played at Grandma and Grandpa’s house or riding their bikes uptown and buying freezies. As my daughter Lynn says “It’s not the things you have in life that make it important, it’s the experiences you have that make it important”.
So back to school, back to making lunches, back to trying to make lunches more exciting and back to making more lunches…I think that I’m the Grinch of making lunches but I’ll just have to deal with it!
Until next week,
Marc
