Silent Auction and Bingo Night is Coming!
You really don't want to miss it.
The “I ain't reading all that. I'm happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened,” version:
Top priority is getting our themed gift baskets filled. These are very fun items to bid on when they’re filled with exciting items, so please click here to sign up to fill the baskets with some goodies.
Really, though, the most important thing is that you make it out on Friday, March 22. It’s a lot of fun for everyone, there’s free bingo, a tasty food truck if you want to buy dinner, and the auction is more exciting than you might guess.
Also, we need volunteers to help us make the auction and bingo go off without a hitch. Please click here to sign up to volunteer a few minutes of your time.
Finally, don’t forget about out more sensory-friendly bingo room:
After its popularity last year, we're again offering a small, separate sensory friendly bingo room! Ms. Sills' classroom, room 206, will offer a quieter space, modified bingo pacing, and a limited number of people. The space will be reserved for Johnson students and their families for whom the cafeteria is overstimulating and significantly impacts their ability to participate.
If you believe this option would be beneficial to your student, please reach out to Randi Jennings. Advance notice is not required, but space will be limited.
This is a work in progress! If you have insights or would like to help facilitate, please email the address above.
The meat:
When my son Calvin—who is now very old and goes to this whole other school across town—was in kindergarten, he had a giant stuffed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. (Don’t tell him I told you, but he still has it. And sleeps with it every night.) Michelangelo was a birthday or Christmas gift to him from my brother, and when he received it, Michelangelo was almost as big as he was. Calvin has since grown. Michelangelo has not.
Sometime that winter, we noticed that Michelangelo had a tear in the seam along his side, which had opened up into a decent-sized hole. Calvin was worried he couldn’t be fixed, until we explained the concept of sewing things to him. “We’ll just get a needle and some thread and sew him right back up, bud. No problem. And if not, we’ll get Moose to sew him up even better when we visit this summer.” (To be clear, Moose is one of his grandmothers, not a strangely dexterous overgrown deer.)
But we had neither needles nor thread around the house, because the future is weird and I never sew anything. I did not then simply immediately take out the magical supercomputer I carry around in my pocket and order a little sewing kit from Amazon, nor did I remember to stop off at Michael’s or wherever to pick one up. I kept meaning to, and forgetting, and then he would ask about it at the wrong time, and I’d assure him we’d take care of it soon, and I never did. There are a million things going on all the time, and while it would take ten seconds to sort this one little thing out, I just didn’t do it. I don’t know why. In the back of my mind, I was probably thinking that Mikey was fine, and Moose would definitely do a better job patching him up than I would, and the hole wasn’t getting any bigger, anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then came the 2019 Silent Auction and Bingo Night.
As the 2019 Silent Auction and Bingo Night Director of Food Trucking, I was tasked with making sure we…had food trucks on site that night. This burdensome and gargantuan and thankless job consisted of sending out a couple of emails to some very polite people and then showing up a little early to the event to make sure they parked in the right spot in front of the school. I did this with the requisite aplomb, confidently waving those trucks right up to the curb.
My laborious responsibilities fulfilled, I wandered with my kids over to the bingo prize room, where we got a sneak preview of the available prizes. Among the toys and games and water bottles and fidgets and art supplies and who knows what else, Calvin somehow noticed a little see-through vinyl pouch closed up by a pink zipper, with a few spools of thread and some needles inside. He picked it up and asked what it was. I said it was a little sewing kit. His eyes lit up. “So we can fix Michelangelo!”
“Yeah, I guess so, bud! If you win, you can pick that. But there’s a lot of fun stuff here,” I said, gesturing at the whole room of fun stuff. He saw none of it. There was only the sewing kit.
Less than an hour later, or perhaps three eternities, by Calvin’s clock, we were sitting in the cafeteria with a couple of bingo cards, and the big event started. And Calvin got the first bingo of the night, as though he had simply willed the win into existence. He showed his card, received his prize claim ticket, and practically sprinted to the prize room. He walked right up to that sewing kit, picked it up, turned in his ticket, and walked proudly out. There hasn’t been a six-year-old kid more pleased to have secured a needle and thread for himself in a hundred years. You couldn’t have traded him for it for anything. He was ridiculously happy.
Here was this thing that I had kept putting off, had continued to ignore, had simply not realized how much it mattered to him, no matter how many times he brought it up—something I kept promising him we would take care of, but never quite getting around to it. And it was so important to him, that in a roomful of toys and games and infinitely cool junk that he would normally agonize over not getting, all he cared about was the little sewing kit. How many nights had he fallen asleep thinking about the hole in his stuffed friend, running a finger along the popped seam, wondering when his stupid old man was ever going to take care of the problem? A truly shameful failure by me, in some small way, if I dwell on it—how did I not notice that this mattered so much to my kid, why didn’t I at some point in the preceding months do this incredibly trivial thing for him?
But if I had, he never would have had that moment. His little hyper-fixated brain knowing right away that he had to have that sewing kit, and then the waiting, and then the winning, and then the getting. As pleased as he had ever been with himself. Because of a dollar store sewing kit, which we would use to patch up his friend.
The 2019 Silent Auction and Bingo Night was a spectacular success, then. I have no idea how much money the PTO raised that year, because I was merely the Director of Food Trucking, and had not yet then been wrangled into a position of further responsibility that would compel me to care about such things. But it was a spectacular success for my family, because my son won a little see-through vinyl pouch with some needles and thread inside, and Michelangelo would lose stuffing no more.
So I hope your family will come out on March 22. The auction and the bingo are both fun, and whatever you can donate ends up right back in the school, helping the wonderful Johnson staff and teachers help our kids. And over in the prize room there might be a silly little overlooked thing that will inexplicably mean the world to your kid, even if only for a little while. They get harder and harder to delight, these kids, the older they get. But for now, there’s still Bingo Night at the local elementary school, and their eyes still light up for a cheap little sewing kit that can put the world to rights.