By Lori Perkins
It was a weird September, and a weird Labor Day. I started getting ads for Halloween in my email in August, but hardly any dorm-room-décor and/or backpack/notebooks/lunch box ads. Didn’t see a lot of those articles popping up in my feed either.
And that’s because NO ONE is excited about going back to school.
Not the teachers (my brother is one) who are fearful of what the Delta variant will do to both the under 12 student population, and what they might carry home; and parents who worry about their unvaccinated under 12s. I know that if I was the parent of an unvaccinated under 12, I would petition to home school, if I could (I can work from home), but who wants another year of that?
This malaise about returning to school really hit me this weekend. I had to get some office supplies and found that the best way to get what I needed was to order it and pick it up later that day (because I wanted to organize my stuff over the weekend so that I could be raring to go for the work week), but when I drove into the local Staples, which has one of the largest parking lots in my area, there was not a single parking space to be had, as though it was Black Friday in a New Jersey mall.
Having learned how to wait for an opening and then drive in, I secured a space and sauntered into the store, only to be greeted by a huge line snaking all the way back to the office chairs. Each spot on line consisted of an older adult and a kid or two, and I realized that all these people had waited until the last possible moment to buy school supplies.
School in New York City starts today.