The Ruckus Over the Forgotten Backpack

Rude Awakening

A Rude Awakening

This morning, at a very early hour, I was awakened by a knocking at my bedroom door. When I got up to see what it was about, I was informed that my 10-year old nephew had forgotten his backpack which he needed for school – could I drive to his school, to drop it off?

Now of course, I was more than a little bit displeased – I had gotten to bed very late last night,  and had been thinking that I might have to sleep in a little late in order to be able to get enough sleep. The early awakening had dashed those hopes. But, I guess the backpack must have contained some very important items for school, and I was just about the only person available at that time who could make the drive – his mother and father were both already at their jobs.

So, I got ready rather quickly, and we got into the car – me,  my niece (who is the big sister of my nephew), and her grandmother (who is my mother).  My niece sat in the front passenger seat, to act as a kind of copilot, to sort of guide me to the school that her little brother went to (she herself was on a school vacation – it seems that nowadays the kids have rather different school schedules than what I had when I was a kid); and her grandmother sat in the back seat, going along for the ride. (She actually had a kind of agenda in mind, as I would find out as the “outing” progressed.)

The “Voyage” Begins

And so we started out on the mission to get the forgotten school backpack to the little fellow who had absentmindedly left it at home (but then again, it seems that most kids seem to do that, at least a little more than once in a while.) Now, my nephew attends school fairly far away from home – it’s far out of walking range, and so he is normally driven there by his father, who drops him off at the school, on his way to work. I can imagine the little scene that must have occurred when it was discovered that my nephew had forgotten his “essential baggage” at home — there probably was an impromptu scolding and loud little lecture given to the boy at the school drop-off point, which may even have included a few adult words in it. Then the “row of dominoes” was set in motion – the Father called the Mother, who was busy at her job, and the Mother called the the boy’s Big Sister (my niece), who was at home with her Grandma (my mother), and so Grandma called upon Me to drive to the school.

The Domino Effect

Now, the traffic on the way to the school is usually very heavy with rush hour traffic in the early mornings, and so I felt a little bit nervous – I had not driven in that kind of traffic for awhile. But then again, the drive does go through some very nice scenery (even though you can’t always be looking at it when you have to concentrate on the road in heavy traffic). So we started out on the little “excursion”.

Curious as to what the young “Tween-agers” listen to on the radio nowadays, I asked my niece to put the radio to her favorite station, and it was one of those kinds of stations that plays the kind of stuff that is somewhere between “Pop” and “Hip-hop” music – (or at least, that’s best way I seem to be able to describe it at this time). She told me that most of the kids at her school like that kind of music as well. I also learned that the Silly-Bandz were getting to be a fad in her school; I had heard that they were big on the Mainland, but had not heard of too much interest in them here in the Hawaiian Islands. So perhaps the fad is finally reaching our shores…

The Scenery and the Greenery

We drove through the countryside on our way to the school, which is in an urban setting. The tall green mountains dominated the landscape, and the morning sun shone on their fluted ridges, casting dramatic shadows that ran vertically up and down the faces of the mountain cliffs. The air was still rather cool, not yet hot and sultry as it tends to get later in the day. The traffic was fairly heavy, but not nearly as bad as I was sort of expecting it to be at that time of day.

My niece and her grandmother chatted and commented in a kind of front-seat to back-seat discourse as we rode along, with the music of the radio in the background. Then a song came on the radio that my niece said was popular among “kids” (probably in the age bracket that included her and her brother), and so I turned up the volume, as I wanted to hear how it sounded. Then her grandmother complained that it was “blowing her ears out”, so the song was relegated to the background once again. Hmmm… I guess the different generations really do hear things differently, in a number of ways…

We drove up alongside the steep ridges that lead to the tunnels that go through the mountains that separate the rural area that I live in from the urban area that the school was in, and drove through the tropical rain forests.

Rainforest Ridge

The scenery evolved from the natural green hues of the countryside to the more artificial hues of the buildings, road signs, and other artifacts of civilization as we drove into town.

Mission Accomplished

When we finally reached the school, my niece took the heavy backpack to her little brother, whom she said was in the classroom “doing nothing, which is what he likes to do when he’s in school…” (By the way, I know that the backpack was heavy because I had picked it up to see how heavy it was – and it made me think that kids nowadays certainly have to lug a lot of stuff around with them…)

Mission accomplished, we went on to start doing the things that my niece’s grandma had on her agenda, but that’s another story, in and of itself…

NOTES: When this little impromptu event occurred, I wanted to see if I could end up writing it up as a kind of narrative story, and posting it by the end of the day…