a reflection on my housekeeping????

 We were reminiscing with a friend this evening about schools we had attended and schools we had taught at, and variations on that theme and I was reminded of an incident that happened when my son was in first grade.  We lived in the Southwood Park neighborhood of Fort Wayne, about eight blocks from Harrison Hill Elementary School.  My son and three other neighborhood kids walked to school together every morning and home again in the afternoons.  One day at noon I got a call at work telling me that my son had run away from school during recess after lunch.  I think my husband was also called. Needless to say I rushed to the school as fast as I could get across town, to discover, to my great relief, that the principal had gone driving around the area and found my son sitting on our front steps, just waiting for someone to come home.  He wasn't hurt or upset, he was just waiting.  The principal took him back to school and I came and picked him up from there.  This all happened 46 years ago.  No cell phones or tracking devices.  When I asked my son why he had run away from school he said it was because his teacher had told him that after recess he would have to clean out his desk and he didn't know how to do that.  I went with him the next morning with a paper grocery bag into which we dumped a whole semester's worth of papers.  He was a good student, most of the papers had As on them, but it seemed he just couldn't be bothered to bring them home. No one has ever accused me of being a good housekeeper (Mrs. Clean I'm not) but, in my defense, I had taught him to pick up his room, at least every once in a while.  I guess that training just didn't transfer to keeping his school desk picked up.  The reason his teacher had told him to do the clean up was that papers were starting to fall out on the floor.  After that incident he did start bringing his papers home almost every day.  Some ended up on the refrigerator but many more ended up in and on the desk in his bedroom.  I wish I could say that he has grown up to be a model of organization, but he is his mother's son.  It's true that his paper stacks aren't as high as they once were, but that's largely due to the fact that he does so much of his work on his computers these days.  If only he had had one in first grade.