Back to School

If you don't have children, or your children are grown, off to college or living in your basement, texting endlessly, August 17th may strike you as a bit early for school to be starting. On a Tuesday, no less. Though that's when school starts—started—here in the Boulder Valley School District.

Not that I'm complaining.

The day before it all began we dropped off supplies and met our children's teachers. I hadn't gotten money to the school—didn't check a box, something—in time last spring for our children's supplies to be bought in a tidy lump by the school, and so Donna, my wife, ended up going to Target and picking them up ala carte for about the same money it would have cost us to go out and stuff ourselves on sushi.

She had the bags, six of them, three for each son, sitting on the floor when I got home from karate yesterday. I assumed we'd simply drop off the supplies, dump them into a big tub in the corner, say hello and be gone. I had to get Ian to karate at 3:15 and wouldn't have time to be lingering in the classroom and hallways, chatting up anyone I recognized or hadn't seen all summer, my children tugging on me CAN WE GO NOW? DAD!!!

But then I discovered that all the supplies had to be put in the correct baskets, which were scattered about the room, apparently to make the exercise interesting. Also, I had no idea, really, what sort of supplies were in the bags, only that, collectively, they were heavy, and I was already tired and sweaty from lugging them on foot all the way from our house, looking like some day laborer hauling buckets of cement while the other parents who had checked the box in the spring, or had smart baskets on their bikes, large backpacks one would use for a week-long trip into the wilderness, went by, happy they had thought things through a little better than I had.

I took care of Zachary's first-grade supplies first, feeling, possibly because I'm getting old and petty, a tinge of envy that, for the second year in a row he had got a looker—a hottie, as they say now—for a teacher. I wondered, as I dropped glue sticks and markers into baskets, what this did for a child, and what affect it possibly had on me that my kindergarten teacher, who, while kind and decent, was old and plump as a pumpkin, with a big wart above her eyebrow and a mustache thicker than anything I could grow until I was well into my twenties, that my 1st and 2nd grade teachers were both wrinkled up nuns wearing pre-Vatican II habits; I hadn't got a looker until I was in third grade, and really, that was only by comparison—she wasn't a nun, and was fresh out of college, we were told—and after that nothing, until I was in college, most of which I don't remember. Such were the times.

It was better than ten minutes before I finished and started down the hall to Ian's class, running into a friend along the way, who introduced me to his friends, whose son, looking weary and wearing a hospital mask, I saw now, had leukemia. My friend had texted me the mother's phone number way back in May and I said I would call her but never managed to. Suddenly, looking at the boy, at his parents, I felt like a real asshole, the worse for thinking I had to hurry or Ian—who'd run ahead to his own classroom, whose hair, we might have consoled the boy, had grown back, if somewhat darker, and not as curly—would miss his karate.

"Why's he wearing that mask?" Zachary wondered, standing beside me holding my hand.

"He's got leukemia," all of us adults standing around the boy said not loudly but all at once. The boy, a year younger than Zachary, in kindergarten, I assumed, looked down at his shoes, mortified. I put my arm around Zachary and added, "He's fighting the dragon," a term we had used in our house, and still do, and Zachary nodded, smiling as if to say, "Ah ... that." He was just a baby when Ian was diagnosed; he doesn't remember much, only that people still make a fuss out of it. To him, Ian's just a normal big brother who can be a real prick sometimes.

"We need to get going," said the mom, smiling politely, taking the boy by the hand—Germs, lots of people, lots of germs, don't linger, get him out of here! The father, staying behind, asked if he could get my number, and I said of course and gave it to him and he typed it into his cell phone, all of this taking time, of course. "You'll get through it," I said, thinking, "and afterwards you won't know what to do. Everything will feel like epilogue. You'll go back to failing at things that don't matter, fussing over nonsense."

I was still thinking we could make karate if we really hauled ass. Ian, when we finally met up in his classroom, had the same idea.

Daaad ... Let's GO!!

We never made it to karate. It wasn't even close.

That night we filled out all the paperwork that got sent home in the packet. Permission for this and that, emergency numbers. We don't really have a default emergency person. I tend to select someone new each year, and don't bother anymore to notify them as it just eats up more time. One day, I suppose, they'll just get called. "Hi, this is the school. There's an EMERGENCY, and The Bueltels have selected you this year ... "

"What? I'm in the bathtub, on a chairlift, I'm under anesthesia, having a colonoscopy—"

"We're terribly sorry, but there's an EMERGENCY. I'm afraid one of the Bueltel children is in the office. We found a Swiss Army Knife in his backpack and his parents aren't answering the phone, so ... we called you. You're the emergency person ... "

In the paperwork that was sent home there's a sheet that you and the child have to initial, giving permission for a variety of things that back in the day no one cared about. You didn't worry about someone from the media, for instance, taking your kid's picture; on the contrary, you prayed that it would happen, so you could cut it out and pin it to the wall for everyone to see, lord it over your friends and relatives, whose children, you liked to think, would only get in the paper by way of the police blotter.

I sat down with Ian and we went through the booklet, in particular the part where you're advised on what can get your child suspended from school. There is a long list of things, and much to Ian's dismay we were going over all of them. You can't be initialing things, I explained, unless you read and understand what you're signing. This is how the housing crisis got started, how the Patriot Act got passed, people not reading things, overlooking the fine print—

"Now, first thing you don't want to do is call in any bomb threats. In Singapore, they'd probably cane you for something like that, for just about everything on this list, actually, cane you and send you back to class, so you didn't miss out on anything, rather than expel you, but here in the United States, in the post-911, post-Columbine era—"

"Daaaad—"

"Don't interrupt me, son. This is important."

We discussed what a dangerous weapon was. I went through the list of dangerous weapons, remembering that in sixth grade I'd taken a real German Lugar pistol that my uncle had taken from a dead German during World War II to Show & Tell, this back when you could bring things like that to school so long as you weren't pointing it at anyone and it wasn't loaded, and that there was some educational value associated with, in this case, the war booty my uncle had brought back from Germany, that I got to bring to school.

"You aren't taking drugs, are you? Hitting the bottle, anything like that? I ever find out you're taking gin from that blue bottle I use to mix my martinis and filling it back up with water and you're going to be one sorry—"

"WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY? I DON'T DRINK! I'M EIGHT!"

"That's good, son. What about smoking? Do you smoke?"

"NO!!"

"Happy to hear it. Initial here—"

"AND WHY WOULD I TAKE A GUN TO SCHOOL? OR A BOMB? NOBODY TAKES A GUN OR A BOMB TO SCHOOL. ARE YOU CRAZY?"

"Listen, don't get smart with me. Now, it says here—pay attention!—that you can't tag anything in the bathroom, or spray paint dirty words on the side of the building, especially the new part, or be disruptive like you are around here with your brother whenever your mother or I turn our heads even for a second, because if you do, anywhere around or in school, trust me, you'll be in deep—"

"WHY WOULD I DO THAT, DAD?"

"Do what?"

"ANY OF THIS!"

"I don't know, son. For the life of me, there are things I'll never understand. Just put your initials next to mine, right here ..."

"DAAAD!!"

"And here's another thing: you can't hit on the girls ... or the teachers. It's inappropriate, and if you touch anyone in a swim suit, or is it where the swim suit goes? where you'd wear a swim suit—"

"Can I just go to bed?"

Ahh, the method to my madness. "Sure, son. We can cover the last seventeen things that can get you suspended in the morning."

"Will you read to us?"

"Sure—" The writer, reading his boys to sleep.

"Do we still have some of Treasure Island left?" he asks, my son who rejected Proust as an infant, who likes television more than I wished he did, who associates it with comfort, probably, with safety, all those movies he watched down at Children's Hospital when they loaded him with the drugs ...

"One more chapter," I reply. He and his brother fell asleep last night during the second to last chapter.

"I don't want to read Treasure Island!" Zachary cries. "I hate Treasure Island!"

I finish Treasure Island, but only after reading three other books that Zachary got to pick. Zachary is asleep now, but Ian is still awake, thrashing around in the top bunk, excited about school tomorrow, I have to think. My eyes have given out and I tell him to lie still, but he can't, he can't sleep, he says, and after a few more minutes of hearing him toss we go downstairs and curl under a blanket on the sofa and I turn on Sportscenter, catch the scores. I surf the channels and see there's a Warren Miller movie on and we watch some of that, skiers coming down shoots, flying off cliffs, flipping in the air, landing and tumbling in the snow, crashing into rocks. He likes watching the skiers but wants to know if South Park is on. That's what we'd watched the last time he couldn't sleep. "You know the guys who created this show, they're from Columbine High School, down in Littleton, just on the other side of Denver," I say, but he doesn't know what the fuck I'm talking about, doesn't care, just loves those crazy little round-headed kids and their smart mouths, he and I sitting here under the blanket on the night before school after everyone else is asleep, laughing. Before long he turns and faces the cushion and I hear a sigh. I mute the sound and sit there with him in the quiet, stroking his hair that is straighter and darker and a little more coarse than it once was. In a few years he'll be too big to carry up to bed, but not yet. Not yet.