Last Updated : Wednesday, 16 January, 2002 at 09:47 PM -0600
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| Daynotes On a Budget Last Updated : Wednesday, 16 January, 2002 at 09:47 PM -0600 |
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Twenty years ago, I was sitting in a classroom. Typically. I was in my final year of high school.
I'd been accepted the previous fall to the university I was allowed to attend. I'd been sent a letter (I wish I'd accepted it) indicating that MIT would accept me as a student and provide some unknown amount of financial aid, but that did not matter - my father, who had worked for The Order Of St. Benedict, Inc. for nearly 30 years at that time, was the beneficiary of free tuition for his children to the University. Or, as Dad used to say "instead of paying me a living wage, I get free tuition."
Now, say what you will about "cow-town-colleges" but St. John's had been favorably compared even then to the Ivy League. Of course, being planted in the middle of some 8000 acres or thereabouts of woods, woods, lakes, grassland, and woods, one could be forgiven for rather preferring the bright lights of the bigger cities.
But St. John's it was. I endured each day except for three classes. Algebra II, which I had on alternate days, destroyed my fear of higher mathematics, and Mr. Sand saved me from a lifetime fear of numbers. And provided one of the most vivid images I've ever experienced, before or since.
One young fellow I knew, an acquaintence we nicknamed "Froggy" partially at his own insistence (and who, I must confess, to this day plays at least a small part in the mental visual image I have of Tolkein's Gollum character), had fallen asleep on his desk. The desk was one of those "all in one" chair-desks where you slid in from the left side, and the right had a book-basket near the floor. Froggie had fallen asleep and had managed to squish his glasses sideways, and worse yet, committed the drool offense for a few moments before Mr. Sand noticed it.
Froggie, fortunately, did not snore, but if he had, that would have been about the only sound as Mr. Sand managed to cross to his file cabinet, select four or five of the thicker texts he had on the top, and return. All this was done across a notoriously squeaky wooden floor which for once remained silent. Mr. Sand raised the books above his head, and looked around the classroom. Several girls in the back were fit to burst as it were, supressing giggles. I just looked across the row between us at Froggie's face. It appeared stuck to his notebook. And I had him in my next class...
I've been on firing ranges. I've fired a ten-guage shotgun firing slugs (and my shoulder paid for it for a week afterwards. I've fired a .54 caliber black-powder rifle which (through sheer luck and no skill whatsoever) managed to bring down a 1 1/2" sapling growing just inside the boundary of the firing range (never, ever, ever go onto a shooting range during hayfever season without your medication). I've stood under some unbelievably loud fireworks. I've even been within 50 yards of twenty M60 tanks doing a simultaneous live-fire exercise, launching their shells some distance downrange (I was six, the number's slipped my mind). I've never, ever, ever, ever experienced a greater difference in preceived decibel levels, though, as when those books slammed onto the hardwood floor.
At the instant of contact, Mr. Sand also yelled out the young man's first name. His head snapped up, along with his notebook - the notebook only made it partially up, as the drooled-upon page ripped from the book and stuck to his face. His glasses, however, flew at least four feet into the air, and he tried to jump up to his feet - which is technically impossible to do when one is forced into a rough S shape by one's desk and the backpack below it.
After the contretemps, which resulted in one young man on his side on the floor under a desk and the other twenty-odd (and I do mean odd) kids laughing, no one ever fell asleep in Mr. Sand's class.
Senior Econ was another well-liked class. For some twisted reason, I enjoyed this class - perhaps because it dealt with money. At the beginning of the quarter, we each got a mythical $1000. Which we invested, with care, in some stocks. Or so we thought. In truth, I think what happened was that a few kids did their homework and returned decent amounts, and others just threw the darts. I know I said "well, I'm gonna put $250 into energy, $250 into IBM, $250 into drug companies, and $250 into Aerospace". My $250 in IBM went up to about $350 in 90 days (remember, this was early 1982), my $250 in drug stock went into someone's veins and never again saw the light of day, and my $250 in Aerospace came back as $255 at the end of the semester. The energy company, however, went from $250 to around $900. Of course, about five years later when I was casting about with what to do with $100, that company had gone bankrupt, but I did manage to win the trophy for the highest portfolio growth, first quarter.
Which I promptly proved was a genuine fluke by retiring the other three legs on the "Mediocre and under" trophy, by bottoming out the subsequent quarter, ending with less than $100 (two of the three companies I selected went under). The teacher at the time indicated that I should be quite proud, as she knew of no student in 20 years of teaching the class using her methods that had managed such a stunning turnaround, from a +45% to a -90% in one semester.
Oh well, if you can't be great, at least be memorable, right?
The third class I lived for, and the top of every single day was Band. During my first two years of High School, I was in "Varsity Band" which was the "yeah, sure, you're here" group. The way my high school did it was each full-year class was a "Credit". You had a certain breakdown and specific classes you had to take (by the time I finished high school, I needed four credits of religion, four credits of english/literature/composition, two of science, two of math, two of history, two of social studies, two of phy-ed, and two of art. That's twenty of twenty-four required. I graduated with twenty-eight-and-a-half "showing" and thirty-one class credits. That's because if you take Varsity Band as a freshman and fail the tryout to concert band for your sophomore year, you don't get a second credit for your second trip through Varsity Band. I had maxed out my music credits, and took Music Theory I anyway, for no credit, just to learn.
My high school was a collection of five buildings, four of which were connected by tunnels. We had the South Building, the new kid on the block, which had in it the cafeteria, literature, religion, library, Business, some science rooms, the Home Ec department, and most important, the school store. Oh, yeah - and the principal's office. The Central building, which had been new when my father graduated the same school 41 years before, in 1941, held the majority of the heating plant, the middle school kids, the "Girls Gym", some science classrooms, math, and social studies. It also had the middle-school library.
The North building had the art classrooms, the auditorium/Theater, band/music rooms, some large-group classrooms, while the "Boy's Gym" was just that - the boy's gymnasium. The fifth building was Holy Angels Church.
The reason that I typically think of high school during January is because that's when I learned a lot of different skills, the most important among them being "flexibility". Between my sophomore and junior years, the architects and engineers determined that the top two floors of the North Building were no longer safe to occupy. So there were to be no more school plays until they decided what to do (it was tough to arrange for one gym or another to go out of service for eight weeks or so as play sets were built, plays were rehearsed, lighted, staged, and struck). During that summer, they moved the necessary equipment and material out of the upper two floors, but retained the space for some storage of older material. Stage sets, costumes, props, etc.
During the early part of my Senior year, we'd spent time in the upper floors salvaging curtains, bars, and the like for staging for the talent show and other activities the school would stage elsewhere. But in early January, when we were working in the back-stage portion of the old auditorium, which was overlooking a long slope down to the river, we noticed that the "crack in the back" was growing wider. It was nearly three inches wide at my shoulder when backstage, which was 20 feet above the bottom-floor level. It also widened to nearly seven inches at the top, some 30 feet above my shoulder. Which was one of the reasons I dreaded backstage lighting - I don't do well with tall ladders.
We notified the teacher, who notified the principal, who notified the school board, who notified the engineers and architects.
And one January day, we arrived at school and were told that the North Building would be shut down completely except for the hall through it to the Boy's gym. The music practice rooms, the "Band room" which we'd hung out in, the teacher's offices and music library, the uniform room, and all the rest were to be moved. Choir would be moved into a large-group room in the South Building, in a busy hallway so it could annoy the religion department, formerly the only occupants of that hall (along with the Junior lockers). Band would move into "The Dungeon" which was a formerly the location of one lonely social-studies classroom, one empty room, three mechanical rooms, and a pretty funky smell.
So, for a two-day period, some of us who'd spent a great deal of time in the music department's "instrument room" took over and helped organize the move. Students who left their instruments at school had to bring them home; larger instruments (like the tubas, tympani, Chimes, Xylophones, marimbas, bells, and all the rest) had to be accomodated in a room where we literally had not enough room to turn around.
We split up music out of the library - rather than everything being stored alphabetically, the orchestra numbers went alphabetically into one stack, the band numbers into another, the choir numbers into a third. The uniforms were stored elsewhere, short-term, until we found a better space for them; the props and staging were stored in a nearby print shop owned by a friend of mine's father for free. We managed to get almost everything we needed out of there except for the atmosphere and the memories, I guess.
We found extra carpet to muffle the echo, we worked out a method of seating which packed the same number of people and equipment into 40% of the original space, and we found a way to make do. As a senior, I knew the summer ahead was going to be filled with one last season of Marching Band, and we had a trip to Winnipeg coming. I'd long dreamed of packing up and leaving from that band room with the easy-access back door (sometimes one of my classmates with a working, quiet vehicle would park in back, and during certain songs, we'd send someone out the back door and over three blocks for Cherry Slurpees at the 7/11 - which is also no longer.
On an early June morning in 1982, I was allowed to drive the family car to school. I parked almost a block away, reached into the back seat of the car, and grabbed the blue gown and the cap that represented the fact that I'd successfully avoided all of those pitfalls that could attack kids in high school. I lined up with 152 of my classmates (one was graduating in absentia - the rumor was that she was pregnant), and we walked into that gym in front of the whole student body.
It was the senior awards ceremony, and most of us remained semi-conscious throughout. Later that day was "The Big Deal".
I remember clearly lining up alphabetically in that little parking lot between the Central and North buildings. We had on our caps and gowns, this time with tassels, and we walked the half-block to the entrance of the Boy's Gym. We made our way through those doors, down the steps, around and into that gym, one last time. After a time, we came out.
All the divisions came down. The geeks hugged the pretty girls. Shook hands with the jocks, the band nerds, the partiers, and the shy kids. We all realized that we would be going our separate ways.
We'd entered as scared little kids from more than twenty different grade schools. When we left, most of us knew all of the other kid's names. You knew who was brother and sister and other details. Some of them plenty weird. We left as adults, most of us at least basically qualified to hold a job, raise a family, and not dribble soup on our chins. Well, most of us did.
And that old, abandoned brown building stood as backdrop in the growing dusk as we congratulated one another one last time. Students no longer, we turned our gowns in and retrieved the REAL diploma (well, most of us did), and then life went on.
In the twenty years since, I've thought often of that safe environment in the music department. I've often wanted to go back to that room, to those large shelves of yellowed, large-grained oak, and see if my initials are still recognizable in the front edge of my cubby - or if "Grumo" still existed in the disconnected sink. Or if the room was still as big and comfortable as I remembered.
I've wondered about the trophies we earned that sat in the band teacher's office. The big one for the win in Winnipeg. The smaller ones for every parade we won (and we won a lot - our only real rival was the Long Prairie Toy Soldiers - don't remember the school's nickname any more, but they had these "little tin soldier" uniforms, while we had professional black and gold and heavy wool. We won about half the encounters, and they won the other half. Which had to disappoint the other Class A (400-750 kids in the school, back then) when we showed up. I wonder where those trophys and plaques and awards and medallions are now. I wonder where the grafitti-infested table-top went.
I've thought of going back to the balcony in the old auditorium, re-living the night-after-night rehearsals on "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown", switching channels when the director wasn't paying attention and whispering dirty jokes to eachother (then finding out he knew that trick and had found a way to monitor both channels), or ordering the "Crusader Special" from Waldo's (everything in the kitchen except Drano, twice around - but No Anchovies, Please), or just seeing if the big comfy chair in the Tech office was still comfy (as long as you avoided the spot with the borked spring). Or if half-assed barbershop still sounded as good in that top-floor boys bathroom.
I look at the yearbooks from those years. In my senior yearbook, there's a picture of that year's freshman class (the class of 1987) out on the hill behind the building. You can see one of the cracks above the half-moon window. There's also a picture of the junior class on another side of the building, with few windows still left intact.
I've come a long way from that old brown-brick building. I'm hopeful I'll last as long as it did (I think it was over 80 when they took it down in the late 1980s), and leave as many pleasant memories. Who knows. I might even leave as lasting an impression. I can hope, can't I?
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