TUNUNAK -- "Good morning. Tununak school. This is Brett," I said in as cheerful a voice as I could muster at three minutes before eight in the morning. "Waqaa, Kelipaq," said the woman on the phone.

"Waqaa," I said back, my mind already trying to figure out who I was talking to.

"My son won't be in school."

"I-ii," I said, "Why's that? Is he sick?" I was trying to buy a few seconds. People in town rarely identify themselves on the phone, so I am left guessing. Usually I can figure it out after a few more words.

"Shopping." Even with only that one word, I knew who was calling. Of course, she has three sons in school.

"Who?" I asked.

"Leonard," she said.

"I won't be able to excuse the absences."

"I know, but he wants to go to Anchorage."

"When will he be coming back?"

"Maybe next week."

"OK," I said because there is little else to say.

"Quyana, Kelip."

I hang up the phone and stare at my computer screen and 30 red e-mail flags that will begin my day. While this exact conversation did not actually occur, I have had conversations similar to this one at least a dozen times in the short time I have been a principal. I did not record an actual conversation for the same reason I am able to discern who I am talking to from a voice. There are simply not that many people in my town, and I didn't want to single anyone out.

Still, some version of this conversation takes place multiple times every year. I've had it at least five times this year. I know two things as soon as the conversation is over: The student is missing valuable instruction, and "maybe next week" is only a polite estimate.

Shopping.

I sit at my desk while students charge in out of the cold and unwrap layers on their way to the gym for breakfast. Missing a week of school for shopping. I wonder, seriously wonder, how this excuse came into being.

When I was growing up, and perhaps I'm dating myself here, shopping was something we did because we had to. You went shopping because you needed something.

When I had run holes through all the jeans, my mother took me to Caldor or Bradlee's and we bought what were then called dungarees. I hated every minute of with the possible exception of the trip on the way out the door to the Orange Julius stand.

Somewhere in the 20 or 25 years since then the act of shopping morphed to become a national pastime on par with baseball. Nowhere was this more evident than Ohio, where I lived during and after college.

Acres of corn and soy fields tilled under, capped with asphalt and converted in rows and acres of stores.

People went to the malls not because there was something their house or family needed. Instead they went to the mall for entertainment, for something to do.

I thought on moving to Alaska, a more practical-minded state, the Carhartt capital, I would find a reprieve from that mentality.

However, we have had a long history of wanting to be considered different from our Lower 48 compatriots while still wanting what they have.

Case in point, the recent article in this publication announcing the opening of a Target store. I'm not sure when the opening of a store became newsworthy.

A couple weeks ago I visited one of the stores in Tununak on a Saturday morning. I walked down the hill from my house, past the school, up the rickety set of metal steps and into the arctic porch, which housed a tower of broken-down cardboard boxes. I stepped through the rusty door and wiped my boots on the entryway mat, a cardboard box laid out flat.

Down the first aisle the bottom shelves on each side were virtually empty. Dusty boxes of flavored Ritz crackers. Plastic tubes of Pringles. A well-stocked shelf of cleaning products.

The next aisle offered more of a selection, cups of noodle soups, spicy Asian dried soups, stacked cans of Spam, canned olives and rows of condiments. The chest freezers at the back wall held pounds of ground hamburger, bags of Tyson chicken wings and a collection of ham hocks that, according to the cashier, no one in town knew what to do with.

I pushed my selections up to the counter: Two pounds of bacon, two dozen eggs, two large bags of trail mix, two boxes of Ritz crackers and a bottle of dish detergent. The cashier rang them as we chatted about the mysteries of ham hocks. My total? $78.92.

Pamyua did not sing backup for my shopping trip. No one offered me a Targetini. And thankfully no one offered me a store mascot dressed in a traditional Yup'ik kuspuk.

I slipped my fingers through the plastic sack handles and headed home to make breakfast for my wife.

I picked up the clipboard where I write down students' absences and wrote Leonard's name. In the excuse column I wrote it out, "Shopping."

I shook my head again. No doubt in a week or more the student would return sporting stiff baggy jeans with gold letters embroidered across the rear or a sweatshirt with bones and skulls or new headphones to attach to the iPod they aren't supposed to bring to school.

I don't know when shopping became a pastime. I don't know when chain stores opening became newsworthy. And I don't know when I'll stop getting excuses like this.

I do know that students miss valuable school time every year and that it will continue to happen until we adjust the Permanent Fund dividend checks to come at a more appropriate time like Christmas or July.

I hung the clipboard up and opened the first e-mail, a note from my assistant superintendent requesting enrollment data for the October funding count period.