A LOT HAD CHANGED. The school used to sit on the top of a hill overlooking a nice green park, with tennis courts and such, and a baseball diamond, but in the intervening years, some genius had decided to expand it, so that it now resembled some sort of horrible municipal building erected in Philadelphia or Boston, or some other godforsaken concrete nightmare built with state money, and the green park was long gone, as was its murmuring pretty creek, to which our preschool teachers would take us in those happy new years for sunny picnics.
Yes, the happy years. The first day there was one of holding my breath, just so that I wouldn’t be the only little boy who cried for mother. I made it through that day and others. My first classroom was to the left, I remember, and the second one was down the hall. The swimming pool was down at the far right. It was here where we would change, and I still have a memory of a little boy telling me that he knew how we could spy on our swim instructors as they changed into their bathing suits. This was the first time this particular idea of voyeurism even popped into my young mind. The thought had just never occurred to me. Naked teachers?
Anyway, there I was again, at the entrance to the school. Somehow I got inside the building. The walls were all paneled, and there was a dry, beige carpet that ran the length of the hallways and corridors. There were some people seated at desks. I walked right by them, as well as beneath a large metal clock. What had happened to the place since I left? Almost nothing was familiar to me, but the shape of the building had been retained. Down the hall toward the swimming pool, I encountered a man with a moustache and and the baseball cap of a team that is generally ignored by the New York fans. Maybe it was the Montreal Expos? He had glasses and curly red hair. He said, “Excuse me, sir. Are you looking for something here?”
“I’m looking for the swimming pool,” I told the man in the Expos cap. “I used to go swimming here, when it was a preschool.” The man looked at me oddly. “Oh right, I have heard it used to be a preschool,” he said. “But I have never heard about a swimming pool. Oh well, nobody goes down to that end of the building anymore.” “Oh,” I said, imagining a caved-in swimming pool behind locked wooden doors, slowly being reclaimed by nature. Maybe at some point during the George W. Bush administration they had just forgotten it, left it to rot, focused on expanding the building over the nice green park and creek. Now only the squirrels knew of it.
“When did you go to school here, might I ask?” the man in the Expos hat asked me in the hallway there. “In 1984 or so,” I said and shrugged. “Probably 1983 to 1985 was when I was here,” I told the strange man. “Oh,” he said with a frown. “But that was before I was born, you know. That was before any of us were born.”
north! 