Carrying the load

 You know that moment ... when your eldest kid goes off to college and you're all sad, and melancholy ... You've spent weeks planning how the move-in would go? And it happens ... as planned, with nary a hiccup?

Not that moment.

Your little family of four drives off in a car filled with the contents of her dorm room - a metric ton of essentials hefted up four-floors by none other than your youngest child -- and returns, just the three of you, to a house that seems almost too empty.

Not that moment, either.

Fast forward a day or three when said youngest heads back to school with ...

One pencil.

Not even sharpened.

That's the moment.

The one in which you think all of your focus has just turned and landed with a thud.

The sibling that time forgot is suddenly front and center.

The boy is blase. He waited until the last possible moment -- when classes had already started, and he realized the pencil he carried behind his ear might not suffice -- to deal with the matter of school supplies. 

Of course you knew his school also required supplies. You might have intervened had the task of picking out bedding, laundry baskets and contraband twinkle lights with your daughter not been so alluring.

Oh how you enjoyed those errands.

"I guess I need a few things," he says.

You will enjoy this errand, too.

You grab the keys and your wallet. 

It will be late by the time we arrive. The store would be closing in a few minutes. We move through the aisles quickly, gathering things from a list and head to the front of the store. The weight of the handbasket lessened as I removed one thing after another and stacked them on the counter. An orange binder; a package of paper; some notebooks in different shades of blue; pens; another binder, this one white. 

The "counter" was just a square landing pad, really, and with nowhere to separate the scanned from the unscanned, the cashier struggled to process the pile of school supplies I had stacked there in a lopsided mound.

The clerk announces the total, to my absolute shock.

How could it be so low?

"I'm not sure you scanned this compass," I offered, listing off an inventory by category. The man squints as he examines his register's display.

"No. I have the compass, but I must have scanned one binder twice. Sorry, I'll remove it.."

The total was even lower now.

I turn to look at my son. His face reveals nothing. If he is concerned with the exchange, he doesn't let on. Things should add up. Fair is fair.

I extract a card from my wallet and push it into the slot, my mind spinning until it lands on the three bunches of cherries: I have one high-schooler instead of two.

Jackpot.

Will he see it that way? No more split attention at home?

All eyes on him?

The cashier's too?

"Do you need a bag?"

My son and I look at one another. He lifts his shoulders as the corners of his mouth theatrically turn downward.

"Naw, I can carry it all."