Notes on Back-to-School Daze in the Dadhood

- Approaching autumn, and the bitter-sweet Back-to-School season is tickling once again at the goofiness center of my paternal brain-box…

- All three of my daughters, who have for the last three months treated sleep as though it were an elective, will be forced to return to a schedule bearing some semblance to normality. My efforts during this past summer in this regard have taught me a stern lesson: At the same time children develop the ability to reason (i.e., the need for rest to growing bodies), they develop the ability to refuse to abide by it…

- Then there is this semi-annual Hell called “Back-to-School Shopping”.

I say “semi-annual” because; through some process of karmic attrition, 90% of what is bought today will have to be replaced by the second semester.

I hear you, fellow parents... No, I don’t know how it happens either, but it does.

- Marina is in her senior year of high school. Eden is starting 6th grade in middle school.

These facts represent two diametrically opposed priorities and fashions that cannot be ignored, and which will, due to youthful exuberance and insistence, undoubtedly leave me dazed and penniless on the floor somewhere in the Boulevard Mall, clutching my chest and whispering. “Rosebud…”

- Samantha, my eldest, fortunately is working and attending community college. So far, she has asked nothing financial of me. Therefore, she has retained her place in my Will (or my “Won’t”, as we laughingly refer to it when speaking of my impending demise during family get-togethers).

- So now, the moment of truth. I don my Suit of Lights: Sneakers, cut-offs and my “Don’t Ask Me, I Live Here” t-shirt (to bewilder the tourists; this is Las Vegas, after all).

- I have given my “Day-trip-by-CAT-bus” instruction lecture (see earlier posting), which will be studiously ignored by all and sundry, and I have made out a strict shopping list of required educational items (likewise). I’m ready!

And we are off…

- Tally-ho!