I made up a song to remember four items I needed at the store. As I walked toward the office supply aisles, this little ditty played inside my head.

“Batteries, pens, tape and printer paper. On the way out I’ll grab a Necco wafer.”

Getting closer to my destination, the sound of munchkin voices jumbled my lyrics. I rounded the corner to discover that the office supply aisles had been transformed. The now “back to school” aisles were teeming with kids and their mothers.

I watched the kids select their notebooks, backpacks and iconic yellow #2 Ticonderoga pencils. Based on excitement levels I assigned each child to a category: those who were happy school was about to start, those who were indifferent and those who did not care one iota about scholarly enlightenment.

Then I watched the mothers. They fit into one category: moms who were overwhelmed. They were slumped over their carts. Their glazed eyes struggled to focus on the supply list at hand. As I wondered why they were not doing the back to school happy dance, I had a flashback to 1999. I saw myself writing check after check for school supplies, shoes, sport registration fees, yearbooks, haircuts and school pictures. I remembered that, for parents, back to school mathematically equates to:

 Family budget – Back to school costs = Eating spaghetti for the rest of the month

I weaved between carts, moms and kids to get close enough to the shelves to grab what I needed: pens, tape, batteries and #2 Ticonderogas. In the midst of the bustle, I could not help but smile and wished I was going back to school.

According to research, we Boomers need three things to ensure a high quality of life. We need intellectual challenge, daily exercise, and strong social connections. A school environment delivers all three components.

School offers intellectual challenge. When I was in school, I was required to utilize both the left and right sides of my brain-daily. In the morning, the left side had to come to some kind of terms with that whacky little Einstein dude’s E=mc². After lunch the right side was pressed to understand and discuss Steinbeck’s symbolism of the turtle in The Grapes of Wrath.

From assimilating the concrete disciplines of Biology with its sexy taxonomic hierarchies (species, genus, family, class phylum-that’s all I remember) to Maslow’s abstractions about human motivation (Physiological, Safety, Love…) my brain’s synapses hustled to opposite ends of the learning spectrum and every point in between.

The most exciting thing I have learned this year is how to knit a herringbone stitch. Probably not the intellectual stuff my brain requires to create new neural pathways!

School offers daily exercise.  This is fun exercise, not the 20 minutes spent on the elliptical machine kind of exercise. The party my Fitbit throws when I reach 10,000 steps pales in comparison to the accomplishment I felt after swimming a mile for the first time. School gave you the opportunity to play a sport. Personally I had to walk to and from school every day, often in 3 feet of snow, without boots! Seriously, I really did walk to school every day. And, PE (Physical Education) was required.

School promotes social interaction. My school’s social calendar put Julie McCoy’s itineraries to shame! (Remember Julie, the Love Boat’s Cruise Director?) Friday night football was da bomb! Thursday night attendance at Young Life meetings were a must. In school, you could be a sports athlete, audition for plays, work on the yearbook or play an instrument in the band. I loved being surrounded by friends-all my own age and experiencing similar life events. As I have gotten older, I find it difficult to find and join social groups or make new friends. It requires a lot of energy, courage and vulnerability to expand a social network of peers.

Anyway, fellow Boomers, I think Rod Stewart was right. It really is late September and we really should be back at school.

What’s a boomer to do? Remember to learn new things, make new friends and exercise every day. As for me, I have to go to the store. In my wave of nostalgia over the Ticonderogas, I forgot to grab printer paper. Sigh.