Only one more tax-free day in which to go to Wal-Mart and fight a horde of other parents for cheap school supplies. I think I'll pass.

I'm remembering last year. There I was. Crushed in the school supply aisle with 30 other parents plus carts and offspring. I was snatching at the last few 25-cent, 24-count crayon boxes, when my next-door neighbor yelled at me over the furor: "Have they got any more PENCIL POUCHES?" I threw him a pink one over the heads of ten not-very-cheery shoppers.

He threw it back and bellowed, "Any blue ones? This is for my SON!"

"Sure thing!" I roared. "Need any GLUE STICKS?" He shook his head.

"GO LONG!" I yelled, and he faded back to the index cards for my forward pass.

A grandma snagged the last box of Crayolas and I swore under my breath and looked at the next item on the supply list. Composition Book. Naturally. Wal-Mart had stockpiled 1-subject notebooks for a dime apiece practically to the ceiling, but my kid's teacher decided only a composition book would do. When I finally spotted the black-and-white spotted composition books, a good eight feet away in heavily populated (and carted) terrain, I sighed. How to get over there? I finally abandoned my cart, blocking everybody's glue stick/crayon access, and elbowed my way toward composition books, ignoring the glares.

En route, I jammed my hand into a stack of pocket folders and extracted ten or twelve. "HEY!" protested someone. "SORRY!" I yelled back, putting one foot in front of another cart wheel and plunging toward the composition books.

Twenty minutes later, I emerged and rested against a cooler of frozen chicken. Sweating and trembling, I shoved that school supply list into the cart, with every item checked off, and looked down at the next one. I have a lot of kids. I thought seriously about arming myself for the next sortie into that mobbed aisle with a protractor and a stapler.

What is all this? Just because companies make all this junk and Wal-Mart stocks it all, does that add up to educational necessity? Can we please go back to 1880 when every kid showed up with a lunch pail and a slate and a piece of chalk? Every year, the list gets longer and more detailed. And my children are very anxious about any mistakes I might make in my eagerness to emerge from school-supply hell after an hour or so and nurse my bruises. "Mom, these folders don't have pockets! All the other kids are gonna have folders with pockets!"

Glue. Does it matter which glue my kids have? Yes it does. Not the bottles of Elmer's I remember, which my SCHOOL supplied for me (imagine that). Three-inch, thin, non-toxic glue sticks.

Colored pencils. Must be a 12-pack (not 8-, not 16-) of pre-sharpened Crayola brand colored pencils.

Crayons. Must be Crayola, and must be either fat or thin, and with a specific count per pack.

Index cards. Ruled or unruled? Colored or white? The teacher, believe you me, has a preference.

Notebooks. Shall my child arrive for class with a prebound notebook? 1 subject, 3 subject, or 5 subject? Or accursed composition book? Or shall my child arrive with a binder? Shall it be a 1", 2", or 3" binder? Make sure it contains regular ruled paper and not college ruled paper.

Then there's all the stuff that the teacher expects parents to contribute to the classroom because our school system is strapped for cash. Expo markers, facial tissues, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes (did the janitor resign?), toilet paper, miniblinds, hard drives for the classroom computers, floor tile, and so forth.

I have received notes from teachers when I bought the wrong thing. "Please make sure Junior brings 8 fat crayons. Crayola are best." I have also had teachers patiently explain to me that with very young children it is essential that all kids have exactly the same supplies in their desks, to prevent conflict. Are they for real? If my child's glue stick is purple and fat versus skinny and white, first-grade mayhem will result, possibly with injuries.

Or--God forbid--if thin crayons in secondary colors show up in my child's possession, the other children will want them. So what if they do? They need to learn to deal with frustration early. Envy is an essential part of living in an advanced capitalistic society. Were crayons a problem in my first-grade class? I seem to remember a gargantuan bucket of communal crayons provided by the school system (!!!), some Crayola and some not, some fat and some skinny, and when we needed crayons we dived in and fought for the blue or the red or whatever. The biggest kids inevitably grabbed and used up all the red and blue crayons, but this was great preparation for adult life--specifically, for Wal-Mart back-to-school shopping.