Anything but a Backpack, Provided It Fits Through the Door

Every rule on that list reads like a story, and I am not going to guess whose. Our house rules are written the same way. "No cereal in the car" was not written in the abstract.

I asked the middle one what he'd bring. He said a wheelbarrow. I read him the rules. He said a smaller wheelbarrow.

A Calgary school, Arbour Lake, sent families an invitation in December 2023 with a more expansive list of ideas: luggage, a garbage can, a canoe, and a shopping cart, with a parenthesis specifying that the shopping cart should be purchased, not stolen. These were suggestions, not a record of what showed up.

A canoe. On a December school day. In Calgary. I want to meet the parent who read that invitation and went to the garage.

An elementary school on Guam went for a gentler version, an Anything but a Backpack Week in September, and its gallery records what arrived: reusable bags, shoeboxes, Tupperware, and homemade bags sewn from rice sacks and pillowcases, all carrying supplies and homework to school. On the same page, the school congratulates a fourth grader who made it to round three of the island-wide spelling bee, correctly spelling, among other words, canoe.

So a canoe was suggested in Calgary and spelled in Guam, and nowhere, as far as the records go, did one actually come through a classroom door, which is the first rule.

The backpack, meanwhile, waits by the front door for its job back. It fits through the door. It goes from class to class without help. It has never needed to be told that it cannot be alive, although the one in our hall closet, after a summer with a banana in the front pocket, came close.