Word of the day is vexillology, or the study of flags.

I know this because over at Gaper's Block Alice writes about the Chicago city flag. (Does this make her 'Alice from The Block'?)

Her article triggered a long-ago and, so I thought, reliable memory. Curiously, one of the few memories I have of third grade is how my class got the idea--what I thought was "spontaneously," although who knows--to design a flag for our own city. All of us schoolchildren got to work up a design and then "someone"--not sure who--chose the official flag.

This project made quite an impression on me. I thought getting a bunch of kids to design a city flag was an entirely new and revolutionary concept. (I was 9 years old and staying up till 1 a.m. was also a new and revolutionary concept, but anyway.)

I worked painstakingly on my design. It was, to my mind, not just a flag but more of a tapestry, with characters, and maybe a boat. Not to mention it was in royal blue and pink. (Hmm, I can't imagine why that didn't make the cut!) Needless to say, some other design won--a strikingly simple one in blue and white. This loss was a letdown for me, but grade school was filled with that kind of disappointment. Anyway, life went on, and I don't remember ever seeing the flag again.

Apparently, according to this guy, neither can anyone else. For some reason, he did a goose chase of city flags throughout Ohio, only to come up with conflicting stories:

A city hall employee took me to a storeroom where among some miscellaneous items was preserved an old city flag, once a blue-white-blue horizontal tricolor with the city's name on the white stripe. Time had faded the fabric from blue to a kind of lavender, making for a most unusual flag. Some years later I visited the city hall in Columbus, of which B. is a suburb. The incumbent mayor at that time had acquired a number of city flags in Franklin County (where Columbus is situated), and had them on display in a meeting room. Of course I looked at them closely, and was surprised to learn from the mayor that a white flag with a stylized B in the center was the flag sent to him from B. When I drove up to B. to find out about that flag, nobody knew what I was talking about. Maybe B's mayor knew, but he was unavailable that day!

The flag pictured here is presumably not the one I'm thinking of, as it's dated 1908.

So what happened to the so-called official flag that we designed circa 1976? Was it just a cruel joke played on a bunch of third graders? Was someone in the administration so asleep at the switch that they just forgot about us? I thought we were making history with our boxes of crayons. But already it's been rewritten.

It's vexing.

More notes on flags:
Unrelatedly, a film about the gentrification of one neighborhood in Columbus is "Flag Wars."

My town, as we were told repeatedly in school, has the same name as a town in southeast England. If they have a flag, I'm not aware of it.