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My plans this year were a bit abnormal; No formal cookouts with family and only one muddled social thing. So, I ventured out to see my father, in a different town, who unfortunately was working the entire day. It was the town I grew up in. This place is only an hour away, but despite my closeness I never feel the compulsion to go – save a trip I can rationalize by seeing Dad. Traveling there always makes me feel nostalgic, but it’s too close and accessible to feel as if I am ever really returning to anything. However, it’s inaccurate to say that I don’t pay attention to things more. It’s easy to take in all the details of a place when it’s somewhere you aren’t used to being. Meeting with Dad was a good thing, and I enjoyed it.
After seeing him I took a different route home. Sans GPS, the sensation was heightened. This is a mystic land in my mind. It’s rural and hot and sticky. Abandoned tobacco houses still stand and, more significantly, nothing has been put in their place. This place is not undeveloped, but rather was developed once and has not regained any new glory. It is a pool for all things good and bad about life outside of the city. I became surprised when I passed the new version of my old elementary school. Apparently, we are “Mustangs” and no longer “Bulls.” This was quite perturbing as my travels in Spain had merely affirmed the belief of my spiritual connection to toros. The school was beautiful, modern and clean, and could not have been more than a few years old.
I kept driving home. I drove past small hills and valleys and very much farmland. I couldn’t tell what they were growing, nor did I really know about farming. Kudzu as far as the eye could see. When I was kid, I was always told that the Spanish had brought kudzu to the New World hoping that cows would eat it. They did not, and thus it grew. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I like the idea of it.
Still driving home, I passed my original elementary school and it immediately took me back to my childhood. No, that’s not really true. The foundation of long and expensive education began here, at this place. But, it was exciting and significant to think that this was where learning started for me.
Initially, I had planned to just pass my old school, but at nearly the last second I whizzed right at the intersection and directly into its parking lot. I parked at the left corner of the building; there weren’t any markings left for parking spaces anymore, just hard grass-cracked asphalt. This side of the building ended abruptly with the gymnasium-stage room, with the opposite end of the building being a similarly sized square that housed the cafeteria and a small office. The building, as a whole, was shaped like a dumbbell – two squares at each end, connected via a long corridor. Classrooms were uniformly connected to both sides of this corridor.
The building had been neglected. The front yard and shrubs were out of sort. Wire-embedded glass windows were either broken or cracked and random building materials were scattered at the front door. But, the building looked solid. It looked like a rock that had been there for a hundred years. And I continued to walk.
The thrill junkie I am kept saying “go in,” and I even scanned around for a low enough window or a door that wasn’t pad locked. However, it being the 4th, I decided it wasn’t civic to break in.
I continued walking down to the other end of the school, I went past the field were I used to play T-Ball and a random playground that I could not remember. The back of the school was bizarre, because if the grass would have been cut, the school could have looked like it was still in use. I walked past a row of temporary trailers that, I assume, became permanent as the school needed to accommodate more students. Other than the trailers behind the school, the back had one real building that housed three classrooms. Each classroom door had a cartoon figure painted on the front. This classroom, Mr. Pooh, evoked a powerful thing: I remembered this was my first grade classroom.
My mind seamlessly jumped to another memory about first grade and this classroom. I remember a day when we were reading a story about a gingerbread man, the one that ran away after he was baked. At the same time we were reading this story, we also were literally baking gingerbread men – people, whatever. The entire class was to eat the gingerbread men after lunch, but when we returned they had “ran away.” Away, they ran. I was a smart little kid and so I was skeptical, however I wholeheartedly believed this ruse. More importantly, I still to this day can feel that sharp little pain in my heart when I really believed that my baked gingerbread man had ran away. And, I’ve been angry ever since.
At the backside of the gymnasium, where I had started this trek, I found a door completely open and I walked inside. It was clean. The inside had a natural amount of dust but there were no signs of squatters or debris anywhere. The floor still had the basketball lines on it and the hardwood floor was thick and solid. It was covered with varnish like a car glazed over with winter ice. Walking in that door put me directly on the stage looking out towards the rest of the gymnasium. I had forgotten there was a stage. I couldn’t remember anything about this room, and I felt nothing.
It didn’t take long to discover nothing in the gym, so I immediately went to the classic oversized gym door that led to the main artery of the school. I had a slight reservation, not out of any genuine fear, but because others in my position would not think it a good idea to continue further inside. But since I didn’t believe in anything paranormal and I didn’t believe anyone else was there and I felt morally vindicated of trespassing because I had once attended this school and it was mine, I decided to go.
I wanted to see anything there was to see. I systematically went through each classroom; I started on the left side of the hallway and then jumped to the room or classroom directly across on the right. In a way, it was classic and I was happy that the desks were still in the classrooms; that you could identify that this was once a school. I had been worried that the place was going to be cleaned out. Seeing some resemblance of this once being a school was the meat and potatoes of the thing. Again, I think for many people some of these sights may have been scary, but I had existed here before and never once had a bad feeling. It was a rare thing to find something exciting and not threatening. I continued on but my memories did not. I could not remember anything new or specific like I thought I would. I found my second grade classroom, which was the last class I took there.
I continued my trip down the barren and lifeless hall. It was getting darker. Waiting to find my way out in the dark was a bad idea, so I moved faster. I went through the cafeteria where I suddenly remembered I had once purposely tripped a fellow classmate by sticking my leg out in a slapstick kind of way. We would receive a little paper apple each day as a reward for not doing anything bad. That day I lost half an apple.
In the back of the cafeteria kitchen I saw the freezer. For a second I thought about going in, but I decided that was stupid.
After I left the cafeteria I went back through the entire school out the same door I entered in at the gym, and visited the outside trailers that were completely unlocked or unpadlocked, which meant I should go inside. I really don’t have any memory of these and I am not sure if they were there when I was a kid or not. I felt contented after seeing the trailers; that I had explored everything to my satisfaction.
I left my old abandoned school and started driving back home. I don’t know if there is any true significance, emotional or otherwise, of going back to that town and visiting that building. But, I was happy I had seen it and I started to write something nice about visiting my first elementary school, especially because I am set to begin graduate school this fall, something I consider a big step for my life. Others would probably say that it was about visiting your roots, or that you cannot know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve come from. To me it was just a building that I spent some time in when I was a child. I learned things there and I enjoyed it. I went there again to say “Hello.”
