…just walked over your grave…
This heap of rubble is all that’s left of a school that I spent the early years of my life in, day in and day out. This place was the absolute center of my existence, it was my world. My friends all came here too, and the teachers walked among us like gods, praising or punishing, or worst of all, ignoring.
The hallways were always slick with the meltoff from all of our rubber boots, caked in snow and ice from recess. If you ran down the hallways, you risked a wipeout or worse, a speeding ticket from Dr. Z, the dreaded balding 6th grade teacher who looked a lot like Ray Nitschke. I remember lining up to go in after recess and looking up and seeing gigantic snowflakes floating down, softly, silently on all of us there, and knowing in that instant that that recollection would stick with me for the rest of my life, that that was a memory that I would never lose.
I think so little of those days. I have so few memories now of that time in my life. It is as though those times never happened to me. They are dim and distant and shaded by the memories of remembering, false echoes of the real things, shaded by my later wishes and interpretations and gee-I-wish-I’d-said that at the times.
I should have climbed atop this pile of broken-up concrete and asbestos, climbed up and spread my arms like the conquering hero, the king of the hill. But I did not. I walked around it and looked at the ball diamond where we used to play football in the fall, with someone quickly claiming to “quarter” and then trying to imitate Jerry Tagge or Fran Twinkletoes or the other pro quarterbacks of the era.
It was too quiet there.
I remember shouting and laughing and whispering; kids screaming “red alert!” and doing imitations of Star Trek, while running around the paved part of the playground.
All the life has gone away.