For my teacher friends, Here is an article I wrote way back in 1975 as I revisited my old elementary school, Ramsey Elementary School, to conduct research for my Masters thesis. The Story Whispering Walls A visit to my childhood elementary school (Ramsey) I drove slowly around the red brick schoolhouse watching the past’s panorama swirl by. The sounds, the smells, the sights, the feel, of youth now past seemed so real there in the October fall – was I back to remember it or was I to thy to recapture the unhurried naivety of boyhood dreams? The small railed porch, so huge to me then, where young dare devils dived from planes, now waited quietly for whatever was to come. Green grass grows where small feet once crunched on coal spilled near the furnace door. The door, itself, where I would go on early cold mornings, enter, and sit with the aged janitor who would always emptily warn, “ You ain’t supposed to be in here, you know.” But he always let me warm myself in that darkened dungeon filled with coal, oily smells. I rolled slowly across playgrounds where thousands of feet had played tag, kickball, farmer in the dell, and where young friendships had been made, broken, and remade. Where laughter and tears had meshed in life so new and untarnished; where feared but loved teachers worked their mysteries to teach whatever it was we learned. Along the back side where the drive, as then, was still unpaved I spotted the place where I had my first fight, and there, weed-grown first base cooled by a giant chestnut tree; and here, the spot where my favorite teacher parked her old car – and let us young colts start it for her. The thrills of youth! I pulled up to the space, unconsciously leaving room for the long-gone car and the aging teacher, thinking perhaps that that short cropped, closely-waved graying hair would suddenly appear and her face, smiling, would greet me again. But it didn’t. Instead, it was new laughter from new voices; new lessons from new teachers; new hopes of new youth, new life in an old womb that greeted me as I walked the wooden floored halls I’d walked so many times before. Strange children smiled and passed me; or sat in small workgroups outside class doors and peered after me; their wondering who I was and my wondering if one of them could be me as I was then – little, learning simple things in a complex world, not knowing why I was taught the things I was, but learning them all the same. How moldable was my youth. Some think me a fool, I suppose, to roam these rooms; but they warm a dust-covered spider-webbed closet of my living. Each classroom, cloakroom, hallway, and stair seals a silent story secreted from my youth. And now, like the books I once cherished within them, these walls, these bricks, these rooms, these steps, these doors all whisper back to me. Only the people are gone, spilled through the doorways, replaced through the doorways, and spilled again and again and again into life, some perhaps never to return to hear the whispering walls.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 02:18:36 +0000
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