Around 3:30, I entered
the building. The first thing that stood out was the few teachers standing around,
waiting for the last of the kids to leave the building. Most of them were the
same ones that had been there when I first came to this school, way the hell
back in 1986. There were a few new teachers, and in a kind of creepy observation,
they didn't look much older than me. You know you're getting old when you walk
into a school and you can identify with some of the teachers age wise, but the
students aren't even in the same generation as you anymore. Damn, that's
creepy. I made my way down the hall and into the auditorium. As I walked around, spraying pesticides at the walls, I noticed that everything was basically the same as it had always been. There was still even the "Honor Store," a former closet where you got to go get fabulous prizes at the end of a grading period if you made all As and Bs. Not only was it still there, but the exact same paper sign that had been there over a decade was still there. Wow. I can vividly remember my loot from the Honor Store, such as a squirt gun shaped like an alligator coming out of an egg, and a walking set of wind up chattering teeth. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we got there was utter crap and broke promptly, such as the teeth. Oh well. Apparently, the school art fair had recently happened, as pieces of very child-like art hung near the back of the room. My shit was a lot better than what kids are doing these days. Still, the art fair always pissed me off, as after making some amazing drawing of a dinosaur or my pet cat or something like that, some little ass would get their art-trained parents to make their entry, or worse, do something stupid like glue seeds to an old hat, and I'd usually end up with second or third place. Bastards. What's so goddamn artistic about a hat with birdseed on it anyway? And how the FUCK did stuff like that ever win? Luckily, this time, I saw nothing that looked parent-made or hat-based. Maybe there is hope for the youth. But I doubt it.
I then proceeded to the school office, where former teacher (back in my day) and current principal Mrs. Meyers was on the phone with some parent. As I sprayed the room, she hung up the phone, and grinning, turned around and said, "I have no idea who I was just talking to. They never bothered to tell me who they were." I like Mrs. Meyers. I had no idea the school had so many rooms for sick kids. There were like three rooms off the office, with beds and sinks and everything. I was in one of them in the second grade, when I spilled chocolate milk all over myself and had to change into the most horrible shirt ever, provided by the school. It was all striped in weird colors that could have only existed in the 1970s. I mean, damn... I'd rather not talk about it.
Next came the library, with a new librarian who I recognized from somewhere in my school career, but I didn't know exactly where. Damn. I remember my first time checking out a book there, back in the first grade. Right before the Christmas holidays, I checked out "Fly Away at the Air Show," which was one of the stupidest books I had ever been privy to, even at the age of six. Fortunately, I got a Transformers electric train set and the formidable Autobot city, Metroplex, for Christmas, so the holiday was saved. I never got the train to work properly, but it was still fun. Metroplex broke in half at the waist the next year, but creative uses of rubber bands still made him useful. Oh yeah, I was talking about the library... AS I walked around, spraying walls, I noticed mostly the same titles on the shelves. Various Charlie Brown related books, books about cats, (my brother still thinks I'm gay) the entire Cricket in Times Square series, and a few books from the 1960s about military weapons were among my favorite selections in school. (The military ones may have been to compensate for reading books about cats. I'm not gay.) Damn, our library is small.
I proceeded down
the hall where the fourth and fifth grade classes were located. For some reason,
I didn't have to spray the separate building where the sixth grade was located.
They never told me why. Maybe sixth graders repel insects. Maybe they're not
fond of the sixth grade, and enjoy them being swamped in creatures. It might
explain them being in a separate building... Anyway... As I sprayed one room
with a teacher I don't remember, she was arguing with some kid's mother about
a detention he had gotten. As always, the kid was clearly wrong, and as always,
the parent was in angry denial of her son being anything but a perfect angel.
I hate parents. One thing I noticed about all the classrooms was that they were
all pretty much the same. Same basic floor plan, same old school air conditioning
units, same row of doorless lockers along the back of the room. The only thing
different was the line of about eight computers each class had. Shit. My high
school didn't have computers in any of the classrooms, and this was only like
four years ago. Entering the cafeteria was one of the cooler moments of my homecoming. (insert fat joke here) This was the one place where absolutely nothing had changed. Even the paintings of various cartoon bears on the walls remained, unfaded and unchanged by whatever eroding agents might exist in a school cafeteria. My old elementary school's mascot is the Bear. I never knew why an elementary school would need a mascot. It's not like we had sports teams or any other kind of competition with other schools. Maybe they just did it as an excuse to draw the Berenstein Bears all over the cafeteria. I dunno. But it rocks.
From the cafeteria, I made my way back to the entrance, which led me though the halls for the kindergarten through third grade classes. And strangely, I remembered these much better than the later grades. I attended kindergarten at a different school, but I still remembered the first classroom, where several sixth graders had returned to read the storybooks we had made for our English projects. The title of the story was chosen for us, and Brandon Tucker (who I haven't seen in ages) and I were stuck with the daunting task of making a decent story out of "The Pink Porcupine's Problem." We met the challenge well, resulting in a surreal story of pink porcupines, glow-in-the-dark chickens, and oxen named Willie, that told a lesson about picking on different people, and not judging a book by its cover. I rock. At the end of the hall, there it was. The classroom I started my Parks career at, where Mrs. Bradshaw held dominion over the first grade. I clearly remember the first day, when Timmy Scribner, Ashley Flowers, and myself were made to sit in the hall for generally being bastards. As the years passed, they went on to become total hell-raisers, and I became a nice, quiet young man. I wonder whatever happened to them. In more creepiness, the tables were arranged in exactly the same pattern as they were when I first came there. Even more creepy is me remembering that.
It seems weird just how many specifics I remembered from these rooms. Such as the torture of sitting in Mrs. Burd's room, copying sentences off the board all day, or the several thousand detentions I was given by Mrs. Waller. Remembering Mrs. Dickey's class, (since converted to a music room... Appropriate, since it has somewhat of a stage in there..) where we had to ask permission before sharpening a pencil, and she had to inspect the nub to make sure we didn't break it on purpose. I can remember sitting in Mrs. Mitchell's class making faces at one of my younger friends who was across the hall in an aforementioned kindergarten class. Leigh lived at the same apartment complex as me, and along with my friend Joseph's little sister Sarah and Ken's little sister Kee-Kee, (whose real name escapes me) was one of the only girls I could actually stand at that age. Last time I saw her, she was eighteen, over six feet tall, considered the hottest girl in high school, and had no idea who the hell I was. Such is life, I suppose. I vividly remember the school store, which was staffed by sixth graders, which was kind of like the supplier for the school's pencil-pluck competitions, which were the elementary equivalent of cock fights. You pull back on the pencil, and snap it forward, trying to break the other person's pencil. Joseph Marquez had perfected a method of removing the rubber eraser and chewing the metal part into a pencil-destroying blade. I wonder whatever happened to him.
It's really strange to think about it. Back then, I had no idea things would be like they are now. I had no idea I would someday outgrow my brother. At a time, I had no concept of the first two numbers in the year not being 19 anymore. I had no idea my father would die, period, much less before I was in high school. An even stranger thing to think about is that with so many changes taking place over the years, so much would actually remain the same in this place. But above all, one thing sticks out in my head with all the memories...