We never went in the front entrance to the school. In all the
years we had been going there we always went up a grouping of five or six
crumbling cement steps and through the service door entrance. We passed through
the janitors’ area and into the hallway. The hallway floors were always shiny,
almost like glass. Alternate squares of muted maroon and white created a
checker board pattern throughout the school. My brother and I would play a game
trying to make it to the classroom by just stepping on the maroon colored
squares with their flecks of pink and darker red. We wandered the mostly
deserted halls maneuvering like checker pieces and day dreamed about the
history the building held.
Once we made it to the classroom, it was heaven. It smelled of
new books. The kind with heavy bright white pages. When we unpacked them from
their cellophane prisons they released the most pleasant fragrance of glued
paper and ink. When we fanned open the pages, it felt like spring. New and full
of potential. We would stack these in the cupboard in Mom’s classroom and
surreptitiously place some of the foil stars she kept to put on student’s
papers into our pockets. Those little treasures in gold, silver, red, blue, and
green metallic thrilled us.
Our next task would be the bulletin board. The large rectangular announcement area to
the right of the shorter chalkboard would call to our imaginations all summer
tempting us with any number of ideas. Armed with open staplers we would stab
its cork skin and adorn it with thick green construction paper. Green is one of
my mother’s favorites. Then we cut out beautiful purple orbs and carefully
tattooed them in black ink with students’ names. We would attach them to the
paper arranged in a bunch like grapes and put up letters that read “Welcome to
the Bunch”.
My brother would draw complex cities of chalk on the large black
board, while I helped Mom organize more things. One thing she wouldn't let us
touch was her desk. It was a massive, carefully organized bunch of
disorganization. The large desk calendar that anchored everything was covered
in doodles, mainly of bunnies. I liked to sit in her chair and pretend I was a
teacher like she was. The drawers were
miniature time capsules, full of things she confiscated off her mischievous
students from year to year like jacks, a set of old maid cards, several Hot
Wheels cars, and some lip gloss.
We spent our last week of summer vacation each year not at the
pool, the playground, or the trail on the mountains behind our home, but
soaking up the history of those school halls and building our own family
stories. History seeped from every pore in that school building. History of
students past.Trophies in cases from long ago victories. Fading pictures of
sports teams and drama clubs. Indelible marks of nation’s past on the arm of
the school superintendent who served in World War II and spent time in a German
prison camp. Our parents’ working lives were there. Our lives were there.
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