Long Overdue Props: Back to School

In today's installment of my long-running Long Overdue Props series, I'd like to remember a dormant rite of fall: Back to school shopping.

I may not have always enjoyed it at the time, but I look now with great fondness on the annual trip to K-Mart, its cramped aisles bursting with the bounty of, as a poetic friend once wrote longingly nearly a decade ago, "new yellow pencils with perfect erasers with nice clean edges unmarred by use."

New locks for lockers, pens of every color, and let's not forget the Holy Grail of back-to-school shopping: College-ruled notebooks. Those narrow lines made me feel so adult. My imagination sped to the future, and I could just see myself in college, festooned in bow-tie and tweed, studiously taking notes amidst the ivy of New England.

New England, yes. Ivy, not so much. If college had only been as intellectual as those college ruled notebooks had promised.