Slowly, the Sun Is Setting on Summer

With a month to go before the start of school, I’m on a leisurely cruise through still-neat aisles of school supplies . . . a solitary shopper, ahead, this time, of the madding crowd.

The notebooks are stacked in tall, neat piles; bins overflow with glue bottles, scissors, crayons and rulers; the walls are lined with row upon row of pencils, protractors, erasable pens. . . .

I consult three separate lists of school supplies--for second grade, fourth grade and middle school--and scan the rows to pick and choose.

Is it wide-rule or college-rule paper we need? Can the little one use these scissors with pointy tips, or are we still at the blunt edge stage? Should I get white glue or glue sticks, blue ink pens or black, the pencil case with Taz or Winnie the Pooh? Is the $12 Rugrats lunch box worth the price, when I know it’ll be lost in the first month of school?

I look up and spot the mother lode--a Spice Girls poster peering down at me from the end of the row. But when I round the corner to reach the display, I pull up short.

There are empty shelves where supplies should be. The rows and racks have been picked clean. No more Baby Emma pencil cases, or lunch boxes with Sporty Spice on them. No more notebooks graced by Scary or Posh, or pens bearing the signature of erstwhile-Ginger Spice. . . .

Gone are the items a fourth-grade girl needs to begin the year in her classmates’ good graces.

Suddenly my early-bird smugness fades. It is only August, and already I’m behind schedule . . . running late, again, for school.

*

It’s a typical summer for my children this year. They sleep late most days, spend long hours in the pool, pass too-hot afternoons at movie theaters and in air-conditioned malls.

And finally, the days have melted beneath the blazing sun into a kind of sameness. “I’m bored” rings out now more and more, amid the bickering that has taken hold.

But still, they cling to the promise summer always seems to hold.

I am silently counting down to summer’s end, desperate to take the beach towels and swimsuits stuffed damp in their backpacks every day, and replace them with the notebooks and rainbow-colored markers they’ll be needing for school. Desperate to whisk them out of the house each morning, to get them to bed before midnight each night, to give the television and the refrigerator door a rest.

So I nudge them toward the start of school, reminding them of reading lists and pen pal letters and other summer assignments left undone.

And they counter--begging for just one more trip away, for the camping trip I promised, for a night at the beach, a visit to Las Vegas. . . .

And I realize that I am torn, like them, between summer and fall, caught in the schizophrenia of August, when the pressure to enjoy the waning days of summer vacation goes head-to-head with the pressure to prepare for the upcoming start of school.

I think of all I’d planned and left undone: the educational visits to museums and zoos, the weekend visits with family and friends, not to mention the family reading sessions I’d scheduled for each day.

As always, I started this summer with such big plans that I approach its end with an odd mixture of relief and failure--a growing sense of panic that we’re falling short, that we’re running out of time again.

So I haul out spelling books and flash cards and order my daughters to the kitchen table. We hunt for pencils, erasers, eyeglasses last seen when school let out in June. They fidget and wiggle, then settle down to stare at the work I’ve assigned, through eyes still burning red from chlorine.

And I pull out my “Guide to California Camping” and settle down beside them to study, as well. There is more to prepare for than school, it seems.

*

A brightly colored poster at the entrance to the store--created by some marketing genius, no doubt--has the makings of disaster for parents caught unaware:

“School supplies located in the rear of the store . . . next to toys!”

There are clumps of families circling through, making the loop from the Barbie aisle to the scissors bin, from the row full of giant water guns to the section crammed with spiral notebooks.

There is pleading, wheedling, as mothers hold tight to children who have their hearts set not on school supplies, but on the provisions of summer fun.

The boy next to me is begging for a remote-controlled car--on display just one row away from the backpacks he and Mom are sorting through. She takes a backpack from its peg and holds it up for him to see.

“How about this one? It’s got a nice pocket in the front. . . .”

“OK,” he says, tugging on her arm. “Then can I get the car? Please, ma. . . . It’s the last thing I’ll ask for all summer . . . promise.”

She looks from her son to her shopping cart full of books, paper, pencils and pens . . . tools of the classroom, not of the August days that remain.

She tosses the backpack into her cart and they head away . . . toward the toy car aisle, and their last-ditch attempt to hold school days at bay.

*

Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.