Keep your Trapper

Last semester I was in class, napping on my arms, when suddenly my REM cycle was interrupted by the sound of an unnecessarily heavy object thrown down on the table beside me. When I raised my head, I found myself suddenly eye to eye with an old friend from the past: the Trapper Keeper.\nAs I watched my smug classmate unzip this completely needless school supply, I marvelled at the revelation that my old friend, the Trapper Keeper, had not crossed my mind in years. How could this be? Everything in life used to depend on Trapper Keepers.\nIn middle school, I would spend the weeks before school started trying to decide on the right one. There were so many factors to weigh. What were the advantages of zippers over Velcro? At what point were you too old to sport unicorn designs by Lisa Frank? These decisions could determine the course of your whole year, and your life.\nI was always up late the night before the first day of school carefully arranging my new pens, pencils and highlighters in the inside pockets in rainbow order, envisioning all the Wite-Out pen signatures the upcoming year might bring. It was the unspoken understanding of every girl in my middle school that whoever made it to June with the most Wite-Out signatures on her Trapper Keeper was the winner. (But if your Trapper Keeper didn’t have a zipper, you could forget about getting signatures from the popular girls that year. Hopefully you didn’t even bother purchasing a Wite-Out pen.)\nSeventh grade was kind of a big year for me. I replaced my glasses with contacts and grew out my bangs, and my mom ordered my Trapper Keeper special from L.L. Bean. This particular Trapper Keeper was so high-tech that it even came with a strap. It was a Strapper Keeper. I chose to go strapless, of course. I wasn’t about to be the loser who strapped her Trapper Keeper to her body. But I’m just saying, that’s how complex it was. It was blue, but by the end of the year it was so whited-out that you couldn’t really tell.\nI was too busy being neurotic in middle school to talk to boys, so recently I asked my friend Doug for insight on the male Trapper Keeper experience.\n“Those things?” he said. “I think mine had a zipper. And I threw so much paper and garbage in there that after a while it was like I was just carrying around a portable landfill.” \nDisappointingly, high school and college have been a blur of generic notebooks and folders. But seeing that girl slamming her Trapper Keeper down on the table so unapologetically that day has inspired me to do something I should have done long ago: I’m bringing Trapper Keepers back. And since I still have that strap, I’m starting a new trend, which is to drag a Trapper Keeper around like a leashed poodle. So if you see me dragging my Trapper Keeper around campus on a leash, come say hi. Bring a Wite-Out pen.