panzón and i were reminiscing the other night about what back to school meant for us growing up in mexico. we travelled back in time to the stuffy and crowded second floor of a librería gonvil, where our mothers took us to buy los útiles escolares. behind the glass counter were a number of female attendants apathetically ready to take on each family's long list of school supplies. sluggishly, they would remove two black bic ballpoint pens from one drawer, two blue from another, two red from another and one green for yet another (i remember teachers being scandalized by those modern all-in-one multi-color pens and banning them from the classroom, even though they were so practical!). we would have to get different kinds of pencils too, like the B and the HB and sometimes even the 2H. and one of those horrid light brown erasers that looked like the soles of the canadá brand shoes most of the kids wore to school. our notebooks would come with lines, grids or blank, but all looked the same on the outside, the scribe logo in red and a mustardy gold. it seemed to take these women forever to complete each order. one pair of blunt roma scissors, one round plastic pencil sharpener, one ruler to make margins, an assortment of modeling clay bars (like oily play-doh that never dried, and was really hard at first, but then super sticky), one pritt glue stick, one roll of plastic to cover books and notebooks... meanwhile, the place was getting packed, the line stretching down the stairs to the first floor, where the books were waiting patiently.
finally, when your pile of supplies was complete, the attendant would write each and every item on a little piece of paper and take the merchandise away from the counter (and *gasp* the client!). she handed you the little paper to take downstairs and give it to the older woman at the caja, which refers to the cash register, but was literally a glass box with a small opening for transactions, where she would add everything up and tell you (well, your mom) the total to pay. she would then give you a receipt, which you would take to the entrega de mercancía section, where your merchandise (that mountain of shiny supplies you had parted with so abruptly upstairs) would come down through a hole in the ceiling in a christmas paper-wrapped box with a rope attached, a makeshift elevator of sorts, and into the arms of another attendant who would almost always screw up the packages and give you the wrong one, which is why it was vital to always check inside.
all of this, only to lose, in the case of my darling panzón, half of it on the first day of school.
