Denver Goes Back To School

Across Denver, kids are going back to school today.

Last night, last minute stragglers filled stores making last minute school supply runs, raiding the mostly empty back to school sale bins. (Hey, I only had about two items left on my list, we weren't that bad.)

Today, young people with clothes are a little too new laden with backpacks the size of dorm room refrigerators loitered outside middle schools across the city doing their level best to look like delinquents.

My son rushed outside to see what the world looks like before dawn in the morning. It has been months since he's seen it and he forgot what it looked like. Apparently, it looked just like it does during the daytime but darker with more sprinklers running. On the plus side, the newspaper was brought in before it got wet.

The extra load of first day school supplies earned by daughter a drive to her new middle school, and after dropping her off, a rainbow appeared over Denver. I'm not a superstitious man, but I figure that can't be a bad omen.

Then again, on the same drive, I also saw I guy walking down the street wearing a wig that looked like a mop on his head. If he is a fashion bellwether, maybe the future isn't so bright.

I spent two of the most miserable years of my life at Stewart Junior High School (which, blessedly, has been since torn down and replaced by a tidy strip mall, proving that capitalism is more powerful than the forces of nature like the tornadoes we always assumed would some day take it down). So, I figure that whatever happens, middle school will probably not be worse for my daughter than it was for me.

In fire, aim, ready fashion, I'm going back to school today too, for a course on how to hang your own single as a lawyer, after I've already been self-employed for quite a while, both as a partner and as a sole practitioner. Maybe I'll learn something. I didn't read the outline for the course, however. So maybe its a job retraining program teaching lawyers how to retrain themselves to be roofers. We've had a lot of hail in Colorado this year. It could be a growth industry. The program is sponsored by the bar association, and to hear the wags talk, the main purpose of the bar association is to reduce the supply of lawyers, so that would make sense.