Back to Drool

© Celine Sparks, 2023

I know this seems ridiculous, but we didn’t have backpacks in school. Oh, we knew about ‘em. The Boy Scouts had them, and we had seen them on reruns of Leave it to Beaver, but we weren’t about to carry something that was army green or was from a fifties TV show. We just kind of gathered all our stuff in our arms and went strewing pencils all the way from the bus aisle to the cafeteria.

That’s why when they made a comeback in the nineties, we thought it was just a fashion re-trend like Converse lace-ups, penny loafers, or putting grease in your hair on purpose.

They stayed. They stayed in vogue, although no one would think of carrying last year’s issue. Not many of them are army green now. They’re themed from the latest blockbuster movies like Black Panther, Snappy Lizard, and the Documentary on Silent Film Stars and Their Alleged Bouts With Psoriasis.

There’s a lot of pressure on kids to show up the first day of school with the right backpack, at least, according to the commercials. I was doing good to just show up on the right day in the right classroom. But the commercials zoom in on the kid who turns around in slow motion to show the backpack of a lifetime. The other kids react by turning cartwheels and doing skateboard tricks. It’s a very educational scene.

School is depicted like this most of the time. We’re so engaged with the fashion part and the extra-curricular part and the groups clustered under a pretty tree outside a pristine building part that we forget totally about the school part. What sitcom ever did a plot about fractions or diagramming a sentence? You do realize that’s what’s really going on inside those walls, don’t you, no matter what you show up wearing the first day?

No, ever since the Brady Bunch we’ve been told school was pretty much about clearing up a zit before the dance Friday night. Then real people go there each August and realize the gig is up. It’s exactly like what happens when you enter a pediatric dentist office painted like a space galaxy with actual monkey bars in the lobby, and then your kid gets his name called, goes past the doors, and has a sudden realization of what this place is really about.

When my kids were in elementary school, they watched High School Musical with way more interest than the parents do at the real things, which are sometimes better titled High School Catastrophe. There’s a whole platform out there geared at making school look like everything but school.

So when the back-to-school sales start this time of year, they’re hardly ever about real school supplies. The hope is to make kids completely forget protractors and graph paper exist. The back-to-school commercials I’ve seen have been about cool shoes, cartoon tee-shirts, hair cuts, corn chips, and I promise, a back-to-school mattress sale.

Mattresses? How big are the backpacks they’re selling these days? And are we just admitting to the students up front that these classes are going to be real snoozers? Better bring a spare mattress along.

Granted, I had a few classes I dozed off in. Okay, maybe it was a little more than a doze the time I woke up in a puddle of drool on my Snappy Lizard notebook. And there was the time I jumped really big during the lecture because in my dream my skateboard was about to crash into a wall, so I jumped off of it. Maybe that’s what inspired the skateboards in the backpack commercial.

Not all my teachers served as tranquilizers. Kudos to Mrs. West in the fourth grade who actually encouraged us to talk instead of be quiet, “Uncle” Hank in college who said “Great Honk” a lot and let us make a mess in his kitchen, and Jesse Booker in high school who read us jaw-dropping stories he had written himself. You made school almost as fun as it looks in the sitcoms.

But not quite as entertaining as the psoriasis documentary.