I Bought the Damn Crayons

I bought Some Crayons This Week.

Last year at this time, I was buying a lot. I mean a lot a lot. I had just changed grade levels and taken on a student teacher. I had just finished doing my clinical for my masters and I was buying books, bins and baskets to outline the general motif of my room. To make it just so. I bought a plant to eliminate the anxiety of the 20 that would enter. I found these body pillows that kids could sit on when they sat at my low table. I wanted to be up on the fad of alternative seating, of kids working in groups and collaborating (oh the germ sharing irony!) Not because I wanted to fit in, but because I really believe kids work best that way.

I went to my husbands work and used all of his colored ink for the month. The week before school began, I remembered I couldn’t sew curtains and learned very little in Home economics class. I ordered them off Amazon. They cost the same as filling a cavity for my son.

The night before school began, I looked at my student teacher and said good God I don’t have enough crayons. I had emptied my bank account so much that I had neglected to buy a necessary staple in the room. By this time of late August, the crayons had jumped up from their 50 cent sale price to the almost three dollars price. Liz came the next day and dumped a pile of crayons in my reading group bin. We both looked at the bin and then at each other. It would have to do. The kids were coming.

I have been to Target so Many Times Already.

I have skipped over the back-to-school section, because what does that even mean any more? I took my 2020 planner and burned it alongside my bad Life touch picture and a Reeses covered s’more in my fire pit. But that need to buy and prepare doesn’t every really go away. Teachers nest like a pregnant woman does. We want everything to be just so. We anticipate what we need, what we might need, and what looks glittery and colorful. But we still don’t have a plan this year. So how do I utilize my bad spending habits if the tables are gone? If they can’t have their group material buckets? If the plants are all dead?

You guys. Old habits die hard.

So I found myself face-to-face with the Crayola display. We were playing Face-Off with each other. In the moment, I was John Travolta and she Nicolas Cage. Nicolas Cage was tempting me with his 50 cent price tag. Come on, he was teasing. You don’t want to be the chump you were last year.

I began loading them in, first ten, then 15, then all 20. Would I have 20? I had a dream the other night, it was just five kids and two asked to leave half way through the day and then three lifted up their mask and they were the kids from the IT movie and that God damn clown was doing an evaluation on me instead of Mrs. Moody. It was a bad dream. I woke up clawing at the blankets.

I walked the crayons to the register.

All the way to the register. I considered putting them back, because of the no plan thing. As I was checking out, I saw my co-worker from my school. I apologized to her about the buying of the crayons. She relayed she too had bought a few things, couldn’t help herself. We are all the same really. It’s so hard to be a planner, a spender, in this current climate. We all message each other and read articles and make tentative plans, but nobody really knows for sure yet. We are all riding on those antique cars at Fun Town and we might turn the steering wheel this way or that, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are still wobbling down that track, shunting forward one way or another. I just want to know how many kids are going to be in the car with me, and what I need to buy for them and if I can still do my SNL skit while the gas is mashed. I’m no Will Ferrel, but I have a few tricks. Will they still work with the mask? I don’t know. I don’t know much.

But I bought those damn crayons and some kids are going to use them for some kind of educational purpose AT SOME POINT. I can be patient. I can color inside the lines, or at least not break all the crayons in my ignorant planning and coloring. In closing, be kind to those of us buying the crayons. The teachers, the Mommas, the daycare providers. We don’t really know who we are buying for yet, or for how long, or for what purpose. The unknown can be a scary deal for our young artists, especially when their mentors tell them school is not a place for coloring anymore.