It's the first day of school!

I remember loving the first day of a new school year. Brand new #2 yellow pencils with sharpened points and perfect pink erasers, and a pencil box with a sliding top to put them in. Brightly colored notebooks with unmarked snow white pages. Cartridge pens filled with blue ink waiting to flow over the pages. Lunch money jingling around until it was spent on sloppy joes - the traditional first day fare. New dresses, shoes, sweaters, hair ribbons. That's how I remember feeling eons ago when I was an elementary student.

By high school things had changed - the 60's had arrived - in B'ham, Al. I remember my mother's concern over which schools were to be intergrated and what might transpire. I remember the demonstrations outside my high school and the principal, coaches, and football players standing guard at exits to prevent any of us from joining the demonstrators. I remember a brave redheaded friend jumping over the outside railings and running to join the demonstrators across the street on the soccer field. (The demonstrators had been told where they could demonstrate and they obeyed. No police. Things were more or less orderly in the burbs of B'ham. Not so downtown.) I remember an English teacher loosing it in class one day, dropping his arms by his side, shoulder slumped in defeat as he looked out at us sitting at our desks with nothing more on our minds except our weekend plans. With a tone in his voice that captured our attention he asked us if we had any idea, any idea at all that in downtown B'ham police were using fire hoses and setting dogs on other human beings. We didn't.

It's difficult to imagine now, but back then there wasn't the constant media coverage like there is today. There was the 5 o'clock news and the newspaper, but my friends and I didn't pay attention to that. Our parents didn't talk about it in front of us. We had long since stopped riding the bus downtown. Our suburbs had everything we needed. A safe, sterile bubble where our parents attempted to keep much of the rest of the world at bay. I guess, at the time, they thought it was best. Things were different then.

When my daughter transferred to a college in Mississippi I was glad because I wanted her to know what it meant to be Southern. Even though she was born and raised in south Louisiana, it's not truly Southern. She took a history course her first year there, and about a month into the course she called and asked, with a voice of amazement (reminiscent of my high school English teacher's), "Mom! B'ham. The dogs! The water hoses! Did you know about that?" All I could think was....Well, shit! We talked, but I don't know if something like that can ever be explained - today - out of context. The THAT that needed explaining was how I, how anyone, could have lived such an unconscious life in times such as those.

....Sheesh! I've hijacked my own post! I don't know where alllll the above came from. All I really intended to say was....tomorrow is the first day of school for my baby, and he called me tonight, excited about it - beginnng his third year of college. I could tell he was a little embarrassed because he tried to talk about several other things until he finally settled into telling me about his classes and what he hoped they would be like. His call gave me the warm, fuzzy feeling that only a rum and coke has been able to accomplish lately.

One thing he said disturbed me. He told me that since he'd been going to school in Mississippi, he understood me better. WTF! ....You'd think I'd learn my lesson about sending my children to Mississippi. One way or the other it'll bite you in the butt.