by D.A. Marshall

Created on: September 12, 2009

There are little things which remind me of the first day of school that have stayed with me almost my entire life. Those reminders - dew dripping off the morning glories that climbed up our carport, yellow elm leaves drifting to the ground in our backyard, the sun hanging over just a bit to the south - would give me an uneasy feeling. Just thinking about having to start another school year made me sick to my stomach. About the only thing that would improve my attitude was to get new school supplies and a cigar box from our uncle's store downtown.

The year I started kindergarten, 1964, we made the first of several yearly trips to where my uncle worked at a pharmacy store. That store was a marvelously magical place to my brother and me. The only other time of year we visited the store was to get liquid vitamins for us and a big, brown glass bottle of Geritol for mother. My uncle was a World War II veteran who served as a medic in the Army. He didn't talk much when we went to visit at his home, but he treated us really special whenever my mother took us to the store. While another employee was searching for an empty cigar box for my new, fat crayons, my uncle would make for us a wonderful chocolate milk shake. He would pour the luscious, creamy mixture from the shiny container into tall glasses, then drop a paper straw into each. We got to sit on the spinning stools at the counter while we drank our shakes. I remember looking at all the different glass containers of medicines and other things sitting behind the counter in front of a huge mirror. What little bit of light filtered through the windows at the front of the store would bounce off the different colored bottles. I could sit there forever. Sadly, when the downtown area lost customers to the new strip malls and shopping centers, the pharmacy closed. That was the end of a glorious era for a lot of kids.

After we finished our shakes, mother would take us home, where I would begin carefully placing my new school supplies in my cigar box. I loved the smell of those neatly decorated boxes. I would lift the lid and drink in the smell of my crayons covered in cigar aroma. That sweet odor would drift through the classrooms and into the hallways in my school for several days, until the school began to smell more like a combination of sweaty children and whatever mystery food the cooks were making for lunch.

Being the nervous nellie that I was, I would lie awake for most of the night before the first day of school.

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