The Child doesn’t like Facebook much, and I confess, my enthusiasm for it has waned over time. Most of the posts that I see these days can be classified as image-crafting or over-sharing, unless of course they’re political, or sometimes, all of the above. The people I’d like to hear from rarely post, and I find if I want to talk with them I end up messaging them privately, or just picking up the phone.

Still, I check in to Facebook regularly, not wanting to miss something important or interesting.

What’s interesting is never what’s in the posts, but if you look closely, you can sometimes see what isn’t in them.  A photographer friend of mine posts stunning pictures of her beautiful baby and odes to her wonderful husband, but has not posted a photo of herself since her wedding five years ago. The last time I saw her in person – over a decade ago – she was struggling with her weight. I smile, sympathize silently, and scroll on.

Another friend has lived a seemingly charmed life since the day I met her – born to a wealthy and accomplished family, married into the same – and carefully tends the family image on Facebook. She posts neatly staged photos of a perfectly groomed family group, and I wonder quietly why all her children seem to have someone except the eldest boy, until the day I accidentally run across a newspaper article about his arraignment for assaulting a woman in a bar late one night.

Denials appear in newspapers, but the Facebook feed is mute. I sympathize sadly, talk about it offline with a mutual friend, and scroll on.

The Child finds it all pointless, though she has Instagram and Snapchat and some other app I don’t remember the name of but which she swears is far more interesting. Still, unlike at least one of her friends, she hasn’t closed her Facebook account completely. I notice she logs in once in a while, sometimes late at night.

Neither of us mentions it.

The slow summertime trickle of school emails becomes a cascade and then a tsunami: Class schedules and bus schedules and practice schedules and have you filled out all the forms yet?

And then there’s the supply list: $50 textbooks and $140 graphing calculators and you must have photoshop installed on your laptop for the first day of art class.

Photoshop isn’t a problem, but the laptop to run it on, well, that’s a bit of an issue. When The Child started at this school, two years ago, parents were required to purchase laptops, which the school arranged, installed all the required software on, and agreed to maintain, for three years. In an effort to save everyone a bit of money, they shopped around and got what seemed to be a good deal.

I wrote the $850 check and made note that I would have to upgrade for a significantly larger sum, but not for three years – leaving me plenty of time to budget for it.

It didn’t quite work out that way. The school year began with a two-month-late laptop delivery, limped along through countless failed hard drives, and ended with a letter of apology from the administration to the parents. We’ll continue to maintain these computers for those who continue to use them for the remaining two years, they said, or you have the option to upgrade to the less budget-conscious, but much more functional, machines we’ll be using going forward. A lot of kids arrived at school with new computers the following fall; The Child looked on with envy, and tried not to complain too much.

We got the photoshop email and as she installed the software, we talked about how slow the computer was. I said all the helpful things that people usually say about computer problems, and we discovered that the school’s software package, at least, was quite effective, cleaning up all the useless files, blocking and removing all viruses. None of it helped.

The Child continued getting it ready for school, creating folders for all her classes, trying to be organized.

Maybe the school’s IT guy will have an idea, I said.

So, the day we met with The Child’s faculty advisor and got her new ID photo taken and stopped by the theater department, just to say hi, we went a bit further up the hall, to the IT department. I asked, is there anything we can do to speed this thing up?

He grimaces, but offers suggestions: I can swap out this or that part, that will help a little, and tells me the cost.

I don’t think putting any more money into this is a good idea, I say. What do the new laptops cost?

Well, for $1,500 there’s the base model, he begins, and though he’s already lost me at the base model, he continues on up to the top of the line.

I grimace, and struggle to come up with a solution somewhere in between his cost and my budget. I can’t do it, so I try to simply manage the problem at hand: Will her current computer run photoshop? I’m hoping to get one more year out of it – we were counting on using it for three years.

Ugh, he says.

Okay. Maybe there’s a software update that might help? Will you look at it for us?

It won’t help, he says, but he’s got another idea. It seems the school upgraded all the teachers’ laptops this year, and he’s got a pile of perfectly good laptops sitting in a cabinet and absolutely no use for any of them. I’ll move her stuff over to one of those, he says. It will be a step down from a new laptop, but a staircase up from what she’s currently on.

What will that cost? I ask hopefully.

He shrugs, those laptops are going to be loaners. Let it be a permanent loan.

I’ve never met him before, but I want to hug him.

The Child beams.

Thank you so much, I say. It doesn’t seem like enough, but it’s all I can think of.

When The Child acquired her treasured Lululemon, she was offered a choice between two cute fabric tote bags to carry it out of the store, and deciding between the two proved nearly as challenging as choosing the jacket itself. In the end, the salesgirl decided The Child was so sweet that she should just have both bags.  One bag is the perfect size for bringing lunch to school; I suggest that the other bag, a larger one, will be handy for gym clothes – but I’m not thinking big enough, because that bag promptly replaces her backpack, and even though she lists to one side with the weight of it, she carries it daily, with no complaints.

The lunch bag – like every lunch bag or box she’s ever owned – disappears after just a few days. Unlike every other lunch bag and box she’s ever owned, this loss of this one upsets The Child.

We discover there’s a Lululemon Outlet about an hour north of us, so the lunch bag is replaced a couple of weeks later, when we head up there with friends one Saturday.

This lunch bag also disappears within a couple of days, and this time, I’m pretty well convinced it was not The Child’s fault, because the bag disappeared while still full. I can see someone walking off accidentally with an empty or near-empty bag that looks like their own, but I cannot see someone walking off with a bag full of someone else’s hairbrush and  uneaten lunch.

I’m sorry I lost it, says The Child.

You didn’t lose it, I tell her. It will turn up.

A few days later, it does: the girl who hosted The Child at Niagara Falls last summer passes her in the hall one day and says, oh, I found your bag, it’s in the Cafeteria Lost and Found. The Child is pleased to have her bag back, and I inquire if she had checked that particular Lost and Found in her search.

She doesn’t remember if she did, but wonders how the Host Girl knew it was her bag in the Lost and Found, seeing as it didn’t have The Child’s name on it, and The Child had never told her it was lost.