the topics i want to write about here are piling up in my brain while things keep getting in the way of me actually engaging in the act of writing. before they all meld into one incomprehensible ball, i'd like to rewind a little more than week and explain what it was like to be back inside my grade school, St. Stanislaus.
two days before Thanksgiving i received an e-mail from my high school's alumni office. they were forwarding information, on behalf of my grade school, about an "alumni event" the Saturday after Thanksgiving. anyone who graduated from St. Stan's, any decade, any year, would be welcomed back to the school for tours, snacks and drinks in the gymnasium, and a serious trip down memory lane.
you should have seen how excited i was. really. i have wanted to get back inside that building for years. i have vivid, excellent memories of the nine years i spent in school there (kindergarten through eighth) and just wanted to see it again, to discover if it still felt the same, looked the same, smelled the same. (hey, it had a distinctive smell.)
i convinced Kate and Christine to go with me before our existing dinner plans that night and, slightly warily, they agreed. none of us knew what to expect, how it would be. i think we were all a little weirded out as we parked our cars in the front lot and made our way to the school doors. but once we got inside, i was thrilled.
the school is nothing fancy, for sure (it's downright ghetto if you ask Christine, a third-grade teacher in a public school) and it really has not changed much at all in the 17 years (oh dear god) since i graduated. but that's the wonderful thing about it, for me anyway. it was a time warp, took me right back to those safe and cozy days when my biggest source of stress was passing a spelling test or weigh-in day at the nurse's office.
i had some important life moments in that school. like when i won first place in the talent show for playing the theme from "Cheers" on the piano (the costume my mother made me wear really won it for me - my piano playing was just OK) and i won first prize in the Language Arts Fair for a short story i wrote about magic eyeglasses. i wrote my first newspaper articles ("3A Today!") and was traumatized in sixth grade by Miss Marino, who accused me of having my period when i so didn't. i also spent many school dances in the bathroom pretending i was too busy to slow dance with any smelly boy (when, really, no smelly boys were asking), and many recess hours in the schoolyard navigating the intricate, slippery rungs of the social ladder.
honestly, i spent a good portion of my childhood inside that school, so of course i was curious, bewildered and so happy to be back. it was like a piece of me that had been so far away for so long was right in its place...tucked inside the too-small coat closets with the brown accordion doors or shoved inside the open-front desk with the marble notebooks and pencil-top erasers.
and it was nice to know that at least, for now, that piece of me will always be there. looking, feeling and smelling the same as it did circa 1985.
mb
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