Expressway: Lacing up a fresh new start

Reader Gloria Raskin lives in Mount Kisco.

Fall always gets me a little excited. I feel it is more a New Year than January.

After Labor Day, my thoughts turn to warmer clothes, colder days, holidays, and school, always school. School begins in the fall and I feel a tinge of sadness knowing I am no longer connected with the traditional school year cycle. From my childhood when I was the student, a hankie pinned to my dress in elementary school, then to middle school, high school and college, where I trained to be a kindergarten teacher, the rhythm of my life has been the rhythm of the school year.

When I was raising my own family, I sent our three daughters off to the Baldwin schools, beginning with Meadow School, then the Baldwin Middle School, and finally, Baldwin High School, with a graduation held on their athletic field the last weekend of June, usually the hottest day of the month.

When my children were older, I returned to school, again as a teacher, once more connected to the school year. It was always difficult to sleep the night before my students came to my classroom, just as difficult as when I was the student.

Now, as a grandparent, I am on the sidelines, watching my grandchildren get ready for school while listening to my daughter's breathless list of chores before the big day. New clothes, new hair cut, new supplies, and especially new shoes. Now it seems like the one pair I remember buying has multiplied. My grandchildren often get sneakers, dress shoes, ballet, tap or jazz shoes, and soccer cleats.

For some reason, a brand new pair of shoes is mandatory. The new ones were always called school shoes, and they had to be worn the first day.

My daughters and I trooped to the Stride Rite store in nearby Rockville Centre, where the personnel became our friends as they fitted the girls for shoes each year and witnessed their growth.

We purchased spanking new leather shoes with unblemished leather soles, a new leather smell coming from the tissue paper folded over the shoes nestled in the small cardboard box. I remember sniffing the tissue for more of the special aroma.

The boxes were almost as important as the shoes. They had many uses. When I was in elementary school, the box became a holder for my supplies. I fit my pencil case, eraser and 6-inch ruler neatly inside.

When I was a young mother, the nursery schools always asked for a shoe box with clean clothes in case of accidents. As the children grew, the boxes housed dioramas for science or social studies. How perfectly the solar system fit into a children's-sized shoe box, with the planets all hanging on threads in order of their distance from the sun, and the sun, a lopsided circle of yellow construction paper creased and pasted into a corner.

Now my children are adults and my life has no need for little empty shoe boxes, but when the new school year starts, I cannot but wish it did.