“Wow, Dad, you’re being really nice to me,” my son bubbled as he placed an item on the growing pile, and I immediately diagnosed him as suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. Thanking me? For school supplies? A good dad would have screamed, “Run for your life boy! Seventh Grade will not claim another Nichols child as long as I am up and taking nourishment!”

Instead I asked him if he needed a protractor.

I guess that as a boy, I too got excited about buying school supplies. I was nerdy about mechanical pencils and binders and backpacks. Was. Am. I wasn’t any better than Bubba at recognizing the tools of my own oppression. I cruised up and down the aisles at the Kmart and marveled at the lack of push-back I got from my mom each time I produced a new ultra-fine pen and matching pocket protector (yes, I wore them). Maybe she felt a twinge of guilt as well.

As I was working the Staples, so tarted up with garishly colored and patterned school supplies as to be unidentifiable as an office products store, I realized that my kids had been deprived of this ritual in the past. The one mitigating moment in the onrush of the school year had been stolen by our local elementary school booster club. At our elementary school, the students arrive at school on the first day and begin to unpack the hermetically sealed and identical crates of school supplies that the parents had paid for the previous spring.

I know that there are good practical reasons for pre-bundled school gear. Like uniforms (which our school should look into), standardized supply decks keep the super rich from lording their junior Mont Blancs over the merely wealthy and their pathetic Cross ballpoints. The common kit assures will have the precise supplies that the teacher knows that he or she wants. And it does spare busy parents one more trip in an already hectic time of year.

Still. Bubba sweated over exactly what packets of pens to select, fussed over what kind of pockets and brads were the best, and generally managed to work up some enthusiasm over going back to school. Perhaps a little self expression is called for in school supplies, even if it means the return of the pocket protector.