Thursday Night's Hallways...

Oldest has found himself training for the upcoming basketball season by playing in not one, but two leagues this fall.  For the last two and a half months we have found ourselves sitting in the corner of many a gym, sneakers squeaking, balls bouncing off every available surface, on average, 5 days a week.

Two of those days are practice at an elementary school here in town.  Our town has 7 currently, but this is the first one... the oldest one.  It was built in 1913 as the town's only high school.  In 1934 they expanded it to incorporate all grades.  A customer of mine is an alumni of this very school.  He just attended his 70th reunion, in the same school house he attended K-12 in. Just the concept of this is awesome to me, that he both celebrated his 70th high school reunion, and that he attended all of his schooling there.

I tried sitting in the gym in the beginning of the season.  The floors are real hardwood, pitted and buckled from over a century of active play time.  The polish is worn, the floorboards so weathered in places that no amount of sanding will get them smooth.  The base of the walls are a sand colored brick, above which stands ancient windows, 20 feet high, covered in metal cages, protecting the distorted glass from overachieving athletes. Balls and sneakers meeting the hard and worn surfaces make for a sensory overload I can not block out, so about a week into the season I began to wander.

 I have fast become friendly with the night custodians, as it allows me to wander the halls of this relic. In the front entry hangs a metal engraved sign proudly displaying the names of the 1917-19 American Legion.  A safety inspection certificate from 1956 is displayed just to the left of the main door.  Each door's a solid hardwood, stained a traditional oak color. They display hand painted numbers just under the 16 glass window panes, each knob complete with a back plate and key hole, a perfect fit for a skeleton key.

Each classroom easily has 18 foot ceilings, The windows span nearly the entire wall and they open, full and wide.  Radiators sit high up on the walls in the hallways, so as not to burn little hands that pass by.  The auditorium doubles as the library, the domed ceiling adds to the acoustics. A stone relief of a puritan and her child hangs in the doorway, a gift from the class of 1939.

The stairways are worn.  Stair treads dip from little feet that have clamored up and down. The twisted wrought iron railings have been painted gold, perhaps to reflect the sunlight from yet another over-sized weather worn window that adorns the wall.  Even the girl's bathroom hosts a mirror, 6 by 20 feet large, etched with traditional names of the past... "Barbara, Ester, Catherine all were here".  

The building stands three stories in total.  There are 3 night custodians, all very accommodating with a story or two. The oldest one recalls the day Warner Brothers took it over and filmed scenes there nearly twenty years ago.  Funny, Hollywood can recreate nearly everything now, and yet they still come here, where the real history is, the kind that can not be created in a studio.  The kind of history that can only be felt deep in the grain of the wood, the smell of the walls, the nuances of the glass and heard in the creaks of the floors and hiss of the radiators.  There are spirits here.  You can feel them wandering the halls.  They feel childlike and safe, and when I wander far enough away from the gym I swear I can almost hear them.

Oldest's practice lasts about an hour.  My tours are not long and every week I find something new. Tonight I found a cast iron fire alarm that I have no doubt still works. I return to the gym just as he staggers out, exhausted, sweaty, completely unaware of the history he is enveloped in. At nearly sixteen, he doesn't get it.  It's likely that none of the children that grace these halls 180 days a year will ever get it.  It's hard to see the beauty of it all when everything seems to give way to the newest and best in technology. The new schools steal from the budget, and the relics like this, so I am told, suffer.  They need a new roof, new flooring, and desperate repairs in critical, but indiscriminate places.

I suppose that that's the way it is for most things now.  Next year they will open the newest of the two high schools, demolishing the existing one that's just thirty years old. The same one their father graduated from in 1991.  History is lost in progress and technology.  And yet, here this school stands, nearly 104 years later.

And here I sit, outside the principal's office like a misbehaving child, soaking it all in.