(This post has nothing to do with Jack's military service. It's just about the color of the bags I carry. And that's not a metaphor for emotional baggage. I just mean the sacks I use to transport my items.)
In my late 90s suburban high school, everyone and I do mean everyone had the requisite oversized LL Bean backpack. We were issued lockers but most of us barely used them. Instead, we lugged around pounds worth of knowledge in the form of textbooks, always using only one shoulder to bear the heft.
Most of the backpacks were purple or turquoise. Pink was avoided like the plague, so unlike the look favored by today's high school girls. I was quite proud of my army green backpack. I'd sewn on the patches myself - one of the symbol for Capricorn, souvenirs of my trips to Norway and to the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, and of course my favorite band, Pearl Jam. My love for Guns N' Roses was not fully fleshed out until college - back in the waning days of grunge's influence, Eddie Vedder rocked my socks. My AOL screen name was even EdVedandPJ.
I fondly remember that backpack and I wish I still had it or a picture of it - it definitely epitomized my style at the time. But I wouldn't have been caught dead with my high school backpack on a college campus, so it has been swallowed by the annals of family history that is my parents' home.
This morning while rushing Petal to kindermusick, it occurred to me that the diaper bag I was grasping along with my purse, reusable shopping bags and a 21 month year old is nearly the same color as that backpack that was nearly fused to my spine 15 years ago. Now, I no longer enjoy that brownish shade of green - this bag was Jack's choice.
Diapers and spare toddler clothes are much lighter than textbooks, so this bag doesn't weigh my shoulders down the same way. Petal will most likely be spared the years of nearly toppling over from the weight of a backpack, as technology will make the need to carry the heavy tomes back and forth obsolete. So perhaps the high school backpack will one day seem as quaint to future generations as the ink wells on the desks in the one room schoolhouses seem to us at the dawn of of the 21st century. Or maybe in 15 years the diaper bag will be gathering dust in the basement and, if I have managed to locate my old backpack, Petal will carry it at school as a retro throwback, the way I wore my mom's blue and white overalls from the 1970s to show how cool I was in 1998.
Ha! So true. Do you think all high schoolers had LL Bean bags, or just kids from New England?
ReplyDeleteI remember when ten came out and my friends (I was not that cool..) waited in line at the music store to get a copy. I last saw them in concert in 1997 but I was in college then.
I went to two years of high school in Rhode Island, and LL Bean backpacks were king there, too! That, and Champion brand sweatshirts.
ReplyDeleteThe kids here all pull rolling backpacks. So weird.