I was wandering through the vast aisles supplied with the max in office supplies. Multi-colored pens and folders called my name as I walked. I turned through aisle after aisle and friendly young people with wires running into their ears ask me if I am finding what I am looking for. I respond that I am finding MORE than I am looking for and they smile patronizingly and move on to the next starry eyed customer. I walk through the mega-office-supply store like a kid in a candy store with all my “AR” organizational tendencies on high alert.
As I walk by the binders I catch a whiff of a memory. It is a smell of new plastic that reminds me of school when I was young. I am transported back for a few seconds to the first day of middle-school in the fall. My mom has just come home with our school supplied and my binder is brand new, I breathe in that smell of new plastic that covers the binder and carefully place my three-ring dividers into them. Through the year that binder will be carried within miles of hallways, stuffed into lockers, overfilled with tests my mom will never see, thrown into the bus seat to call “dibs” on it, marked up with doodles from the most boring classes, used as a bat to fend off and return wadded paper flung at me, and finally dumped into the garbage to celebrate the long-awaited end of the school year. But now … the smell… the smell is perfect and new; the binder is clean and pure.
Now, when I look back I find only good about school but I do remember my favorite subject being recess. But the smell brings me back to a time of innocence, a time when all I was concerned with was my baseball glove and getting to class on time for the best seat.
“Can I help you sir?” A young man with a wire in his ear interrupts my reverie when he finds me. I am standing with my eyes closed and a binder smashed against my nose breathing in deeply with a subtle smile on my face. I smile at him. “How old are you?” I ask. “Nineteen” he says easily. I look at the binder. “You wouldn’t understand yet.” I say and move on. I don’t even need the binder but it is in my cart. I’ll find another use for it … when the smell wears off that is.