Day 240 - back to school

 Today is the 2nd day of the 35th week, the 28th day of the 8th month, the 240th day of 2023, and:

• Crackers Over the Keyboard Day - despite being told it isn't a good idea, many of us continue to eat lunch at our desk, and that makes regular cleaning of your keyboard necessary
• Dream Day Quest and Jubilee - a celebration of Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech
• International Read Comics in Public Day
• Motorist Consideration Day
• National Bow Tie Day
• National Cherry Turnovers Day
• National Power Rangers Day
• National Thoughtful Day
• National Weed Out Hate Day
• Race Your Mouse Around the Icons Day - always fascinates me how crowded some folks keep their desktops 
• Radio Commercial Day - the first radio commercial aired in 1922 for a real estate developer in New York City advertising apartments for rent
• Red Wine Day
• Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day

As a kid, being allergic to animal hair, I had parakeets and goldfish - and I still fondly remember the first little bird who was named Tweety and was very tame.  I was an widow living alone when I acquired my first rescue cat, courtesy of my daughter.  Kula was a fighter who had to be an only cat.  At the end, after being my companion for eight years, he refused to be held and laid in his bed, jerking as though leaping forward to the rainbow bridge as the drug took him.  Nine months later, Panda joined me from a shelter.  She was a little thing, had been an only cat all her life, and had the most amazingly soft, luxurious pelt.   The pandemic lockdown would've been much lonelier and difficult without her, but I only had her for six years When it was her time, she nestled in my arms trustingly, gave a little sigh of relief as the pain left her, and went gently to sleep

I cried over both of them, still tearing up at the memory of their going, mourning the little lights that had gone out of my life too soon, leaving me behind in a world that seemed suddenly so much bleaker

Quote of the day:

I've been thinking about the first day of school a lot, especially as the weekend seemed to evaporate around me.    My granddaughters are in 3rd and 5th grades this year and I can picture the pandemonium reigning in the household this morning getting them up, dressed, and out the door on time to greet the new year.  

The new school year was something I always avidly anticipated.  I really wanted to go to school, and I don't actually remember why it was so exciting other than it was held in a place, like the library, where books were everywhere.  Even though I was an only child, it certainly didn't have anything to do with wanting to be around other kids - from early on I was always that class caricature that everyone knew and no one wanted to be around.  But in school I felt that I could breath, could stretch my mind, could prove at least to the teachers that I was ...   what?  smart?  worthwhile?  different - and that was okay?  Maybe all of those, for I certainly was a disappointment to my parents and I knew it.  My athletic father gave up on his clumsy daughter at a very young age; my mother couldn't figure out why I wasn't the popular little Susie Homemaker she had been.  But teachers?  Despite the fact I was constantly disciplined for talking out loud in class [I think most of my third grade my desk was in the hall, where I chatted with the maintenance staff] they gave me plenty of the affirmation and approval I desperately craved.  And the books!  The stories from history, the fascination of science, the smell of the chalkboard, these are the things that meant school to me and were why I decided that I was going to be either a teacher or a librarian.  

When I read about the school shootings, the book banning, the teacher shortages, and the revisionist history, I wonder if my granddaughters will remember their first days at school quite as fondly as I remember mine.