1. Marking the day on your binder calendar weeks in advance.
2. Quivering with anticipation starting Monday on the week of the fair.
3. Leaping out of bed like a bibliophilic gazelle when the day FINALLY came!
4. Fighting your classmates to be first in line out of the classroom when it was your homeroom's turn to go.
5. That first magical look at your school gym or assembly hall transformed into a fantasy landscape of cardboard bookshelves.
6. Ah, the smell of all of those books.
7. And that first stab of confusion you felt when you realized you didn't know where to start.
8. Do you go straight for the hard stuff?
9. Do you make a beeline for standards like Junie B. Jones, The Magic Tree House, or Animorphs?
10. Or how about that amazing feeling when you realized they sold a sequel that you didn't even know had come out yet?
11. It's very likely that you went into Book Warp Mode, blacked out, and emerged an hour later with an order sheet longer than your arm.
12. But you also took time to become a world-class philanthropist when you bought an extra book for your school's library.
13. Fast forward a week or so when your book order actually arrived and you got to pick up your shrink-wrapped treasures.
14. And you bonded with your friends over your respective hauls.
15. And spent the whole day sneaking the books into classes so you could get a head start on the story.
16. Has any feeling in your adult life come close to that feeling?
17. No.
18. So thank you, Scholastic Book Fair, for the memories.
19. And for encouraging us to become lifelong readers.
