How hard could it be to find the right bag?

IT

shouldn’t have been so complicated.

It was just backpacks, after all. Boy backpacks at that. Boys aren’t complicated, right? It’s girls that are particular about fashion and unicorns and pink.

In my day (she said in a creaky, elderly voice), one went to a store. One store, maybe two, and bought whatever was there. And it worked. We were happy. I remember a fabulous backpack I had for years, probably discovered in Marshall’s: Timberland, rugged and cool, with a leather bottom that prevented textbooks from tearing through. I’m still wringing the life out of another store find, aged 20 or so — it’s getting a bit worn around the edges, but it has pockets where I want pockets, so on I go.

But that was before Amazon. Amazon was but a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’s eye when I was entering elementary school, so my mother wasn’t faced with the hundreds of options that now scroll endlessly before my weary eyes. To be honest, Ma wouldn’t have cared. She would have picked one and moved on with her life.

I did not move on with my life.