Oh, That New Crayon Smell

By Michele Bazan Reed  |  bazanreed@hotmail.com

It’s one of my favorite times of the year. Maybe it’s yours, too.

I know I’m joined by summer-weary parents and retailers anticipating throngs of shoppers buying seasonal necessities.

I’m talking, of course, about back-to-school season.

Now, why would a septuagenarian with no school-age kids or grandchildren look forward to back-to-school time? In a word: crayons.

Well, actually all the new and familiar products on deep discounts at local office supply stores make me smile.

I revel in the smell of a freshly opened box of crayons, the sight of row upon row of colorful notebook covers and the feel of new, shiny folders to stow those permission slips and teacher reports.

Yellow No. 2 pencils, pink erasers and markers in every variety imaginable: bright or pastel colors, glitter markers and scented markers. I’m sure the nuns back at St. Stanislaus in the 1950s would have been baffled if we all spent art class smelling our tangerine orange, lime-scented green and licorice- fragranced markers.

In my profession as a writer, I have plenty of excuses for splurging at the stationery store on my own behalf.

I wrote in this space not too long ago about my passion for fine fountain pens and the colorful inks available for them, and it’s true that I can’t resist those special writing instruments. And I often plunk down the cash needed to buy elegant journals with leather covers and silky ribbons to mark your place.

But the truth of the matter is, that’s not where the real work of being a writer comes in. Those fancy inks can’t be erased. The journals are a work of art that, for me, tend to be a bit intimidating. They’re so permanent — you can’t rip out their sewn-in pages and crossing out whole paragraphs just seems wrong when the page will last as long as the journal is intact.

No, give me a spiral-bound school notebook, 70 pages, wide ruled with a nice wide left margin. Don’t like how a story is going? Rip it out, and all that remains are the usual spiral-notebook confetti.

The notebooks are perfect for brainstorming, writing down random thoughts and images in the hopes of sparking a new story or column. Cross them out, draw arrows to connect thoughts, doodle little pictures- the sky’s the limit. Better yet, the unused lists can hang around in their cheap cardboard covers, waiting for inspiration to strike.

They’re inexpensive enough this time of year that I can have a separate book for each major writing project, or categories like this column, mystery stories or haiku poetry. And not so precious I won’t scrawl the project title across the front using a permanent marker.

And the medium of composition? No. 2 wooden pencils, the old-fashioned kind, with an extra big, pink eraser perched on top. They can be sharpened to perfection with those little handheld plastic pencil sharpeners that catch the curly, wood shavings and are on sale during August and September. I buy several so I can replace them when the sharpener blades grow dull along about January.

Cheap pocket folders hold my research notes, finished stories and publishing contracts.

And then there’s the sticky notes. I use them for everything from flagging information to look up, holes that need to be filled and marking places in writing books. I love to find the latest colors and use them to color coordinate notes and mark different categories of events: writing deadlines, doctor appointments and friends’ and family birthdays (as you may recall from a recent column, I love sending cards.)

As I said above, I may not have grandkids, but there’s always a school supply drive or two to further justify my obsession with shopping for school supplies. Case in point, the United Way Stuff-A-Bus campaign.

Stuff-A-Bus was begun by the Oswego County United Way’s Success by 6 program in 2003 to help families to provide their children with the supplies necessary for learning. Their website tells us the program was created to fulfill two goals: to provide necessary supplies and to give community members a day to volunteer and give back.

As an employee at SUNY Oswego, I was involved during Success by 6’s early years, and Stuff-A-Bus is dear to my heart. I’ve tried to donate to Stuff-A-Bus in every year since.

They work with all nine school districts in the county and serve students at the elementary, middle school and high school levels.

According to United Way Executive Director Patrick Dewine, the program distributed 38,829 supplies to 1,652 students in 2023, equipping them for the chance of success in the academic year.

Any leftover supplies are boxed up and sent to each school building, where teachers can distribute them to students who may have just moved into the district or changed schools or otherwise missed the original distribution. So the numbers of kids helped are actually higher than that statistic.

The program has lists of necessary supplies, donation drop-off points and distribution locations on the United Way of Oswego County website: oswegounitedway.org.

Newly added to the wishlist are water bottles, snacks and headsets.

Buses will be set up for stuffing at various locations Wednesday, August 21. Several local grocery stores and pharmacies have bins to drop off donations for students whose families are struggling to get the tools kids for academic success.

Other local areas have their own versions of the school supplies drive, or if not, you can check with your own district office to see if you can drop off donations there.

So whether you are shopping for your kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews, yourself or worthwhile programs like the United Way’s Stuff-A-Bus, I hope you enjoy back-to-school shopping season — and savor that new crayon smell.