Or, how I got around the fence
I visited the old neighborhood once again today, while in Covina, California to attend a memorial service for a childhood friend.
I got the idea to walk around my elementary school, which I like to do every few years. I don’t really know why I do it, other than the sensation of time travel, and the funhouse mirror-like distortion of scenes that look so much smaller now than they do in my memories.
I can tell you a story about every hallway and grassy area in that school across the street from my childhood home, but I really don’t remember the drinking fountains being so low to the ground.
Today was brisk and sunny, and the mountains were full of fresh snow. I wanted to stand between the first and second grade buildings for just a moment — to imagine that I was six years old once again, to admire the memorized contours of Mount Baldy, and to forget that it’s 2019.
I don’t think I have a real desire to wind back the clock. To me it’s more about remembering how it felt to be a kid, and to see the world like I once did, especially on those rare LA days when you could see for miles, and everything was so sharp and vivid, inside and out.
As a child, I had a preoccupation with the future, and I looked forward to my own George Jetson saucer-mobile and robotic house. As an adult, however, I have a strong sense of nostalgia, and an appreciation for history — personal and otherwise. OK, maybe I’m dragging my feet just a little to try to slow things down. I guess I’m a poster child for not living in the moment. But I keep hoping that both me’s will meet in the middle one day and make peace.
Except on this morning as I walked across the parking lot, I saw that the entire school had been cordoned off with security fencing and locked gates, to keep the bad guys out.
Although I know the reasons why this had to happen, I’ll never again be able to stand on that playground and look toward the northeast and the snowy mountains.
Peering through the fence, I rationalized that maybe this was life’s way of telling me that enough is enough. That you can’t live in the past, and you can’t really ever go back home.
But when I turned to walk away, I heard a faint and familiar noise, then silence. Then again. It was the ringing of tetherball chains gently clanging on their metal poles; the sound that was the background music to my memories growing up across the street. I heard them every night for 18 years as I lay in my bed, when the world was mostly quiet, except for those thin little chains dancing in the breeze. I never really noticed them, except while falling asleep, when they seemed to re-animate themselves. And night after night they wove themselves into the soundtrack of my dreams.
So while today’s fence was a bit of a sad commentary on 2019, and I didn’t get to see what I set out to see this morning, there’s a deep part of me on the other side of that fence, and it knows I was there to visit this morning.
SMUDGED POSTCARDS 