Remember when pink and gray were "in?" I had a big fat gray Guess tote bag with pink stripes. It was just like those puffy jackets that people in my town wear, but I'm afraid to because HELLO, I don't need more puff around my chest. I had a turquoise cotton bag, too, that would never hold up the amount of books and other assorted things that my boys haul back and forth from school. They have simple "practical" backpacks. But of course they are boys; I'm not aware of the fashion-forward trend for schoolgirls these days.

My poor boys get me as a chauffeur, whereas I rode the bus. I had to deal with those "Nobody will let me sit with them!" stories that you hear in all coming-of-age novels, complete with the unsympathetic bus driver's growl to "sit down immediately or this bus ain't moving an inch!"

I remember counting Christmas lights on the bus route, and pretending that I knew more sign language than I really did so I could join in the conversations about "Kayla" and "Stephen" on one of those soap operas that I didn't really watch. (And darn if that "Patch/Stephen" didn't turn out to be all freaky after he cut off his hair and got glasses!)

And of course I gabbed with my best friends, one of whom scared me when she informed me that the killer bees were coming. We also wondered when "The Big One" would come to our California home. Fortunately, the killer bees haven't yet shown up on my doorstep, although we did have a pretty good sized earthquake several years after I graduated from my elementary school days. But by then I had one of those "practical" backpacks.