Broken Glass

I went to my old high school today. It ceased to be a working school building shortly after my youngest sibling graduated, I think.

I've been there plenty of times since it was remodeled, but never really down most of the halls.

A lot of it has changed.

The senior hallway was rebuilt so that the Board of Education could use it as office space. Most of the rest of the classrooms are being used by the Senior Activity Center and a couple other organizations, including a chapter of a tech school. But today the building was mostly shut down but for the old cafeteria, which hosted a hoard of students preparing to participate in a charity run.

I was there for moral support and to meet up with a good friend of mine who is, and was, a teacher at the old high school and, now, the new one.

I got there early. Not one to hang out in a flock of teenagers if I can possibly avoid it, I ventured down the halls that still existed, a little surprised that no one had seen fit to pull the lockers out yet. The first hall was the 'science' hall.

As I walked down it I remembered that the first door on the right was the classroom for one of my favorite teachers. He had a Mr. Roger's meets Bill Nye The Science Guy quality to him. And I did a lot of diary and note writing in that class...not necessarily because of the teacher. Mostly because there were days when I got done with my work quickly and decided to do other things instead. I also remembered that the only violent outburst I recall happening at my school happened right there, in the hall. And the science teacher had to step in and seperate the boys.

Another room to the left was the room where I took anatomy. It was one of the few classes I liked because it was hands on, and I could stay awake better, and the time didn't drag, if we did hands on things. I was always good with my hands. We got to dissect rats in that class as our final project, and since I had the only pregnant rat I got to 'give birth' to the babies with everyone watching. I learned two things that day. One of them was that I wasn't nearly as squeamish as most of the other people in the room, and that I was a kinetic learner. I learned more from dissecting that rat, than I did from a whole semester of lectures.

Up the hall on the left were more room doors. At least one of them I was sure didn't exist when I went to school. But on the left was a room that I knew very well.

The computer room.

I took computer class and journalism there. I remembered the typing tests we did at the start of every class, and that my best friend and I always sat beside each other, both because our last names were together on the class list, and because we wanted to be side by side when we took the test. Both of us had typing speeds upwards of 90 wpm, often breaking 100 wpm.

Journalism was different. I got into the occasional bit of trouble with it. Mostly I hated magazine layouts, loved typing out spoofs for the April issues, and for a brief time made a total mockery of the horoscope portion of the paper. I think I was my biggest fan then.

The hall ended there, becoming a new wall that someone had put up to finish the offices for the Board of Education. I doubled back and headed down towards the band hall.

The best place. Past the place where the stairs used to be that would let you go to the basement classrooms. Rooms that had been torn down when the high school moved, mostly because of the incipient mold that grew everywhere.

I turned down the hall and I walked very slowly down the first set of stairs, past the locker room entrances. I felt the pock marked, painted brick walls; leading to the double door entryway that I almost didn't want to see, for fear that the room was no longer there.

I stepped into the door well and jumped. Someone had set up a dummy right inside the door and it was dark enough to make the expressionless face lifelike.

Sixteen years ago, it had started. Even before I became a high schooler. I had been in love with the marching band the day my family attended the State OMEA competition. We sat in the stands eating peculiar sandwiches that my father had concocted and watched as the band thrilled us.

My brother, in the percussion section, was all snap and flare and military precision; and when they were done and the judges started handing out the prizes, our boy (and a hundred other teenagers) won, receiving the highest possible rating.

The next two years, while I labored away in junior high, I spent the weekends helping the marching band at competitions and games.

Thirteen years back I was a freshman. Finally allowed to be a part of the band. A part of the big kid club that I had been longing for so very long. And better still I was there with my big brother. The hero of my life. Every day of that year was fantastic. The band did great, and I, a clarinetist, was confident and excited and fully dedicated to the work.


Twelve years back and I was a sophomore. I hated school, hated life in general, saw my family going down the tubes, and had lost the small amount of guidance that my big brother had provided me. But when band was happening I was happy. Even if it was a little scary. I had only had the preparation of my freshman year of concert band on the trombone, and now I was the head of the section, along with another newbie, a former flautist.

Eleven years back I was a junior, not quite as sure about leading my section, but giving it my best shot. I had just had an argument with my divorced mother and was in a hurry, late getting to rehearsal. I rushed into the horn storage room, grabbed my trombone, then tripped over the slew of empty cases cluttered in the narrow room and went face first into the lip of a baritone case.

A moment later, on hands and knees, I found myself staring at a puddle of blood collecting on the tile beneath me. The assistant director came in, helped me stand up and mopped up the blood. But busted nose or not, the band was the only thing I wanted to do that night, and working around my swelling lip, I went out and marched into the dark, evening hours, with seventy other kids.

Back about ten years I was a senior clomping down those stairs at a few minutes before eighth period, grabbing my beat up tenor trombone from a case labeled "The Big Monty" then rushing my section back out the door to line up for pregame formation on the practice field. And keeping a watchful eye on the clarinet section, where my freshman sister was just beginning.

I had decided then that I wanted to be a music teacher. I got the chance to direct a few times and I was given the "Director's Award" at our banquet at the end of the year. Not quite the "Sousa Award" that my brother got but...

I stood today, outside that room, sniffing at the dust that was choking the concrete hallway, wishing I could go in there, just one more time. I knew the trophies were gone, and that my old band teacher wasn't going to be in his office. That I wouldn't see the plunger that my brother's class got for the teacher, with "That Crap Don't Flush" burned into the handle. Nor the cymbal that the percussion ensemble signed or the myriad of other bits and pieces that had sparked so much into what was otherwise a lifeless high school career.

One of the students that was participating in the run started down the hallway and I decided salivating on the band room door was unseemly. I continued down the hallway, down past what used to be the shop class room and to the health room door. Down near the band entrance was the old wall mounted heater and I perched against it for a bit.

The old high school wasn't what it used to be. Not hardly. But those two hallways alone had brought back so many ghosts of memories, so sharp and strong. Memories that crowded out other ones.

My family is scattered now and relationships aren't what they used to be. I don't have the friends I had then.  But in that brief walk it felt like I was watching the shattering of glass reversing it self in slow motion. All the little scattered, microscopic pieces returned precisely to the position in which they belonged without a gap.

Some people say our memories are deceptive, but I disagree. I think our memories now are as wonderful or as awful, as our present was then.

Like watching a reverse of glass breaking. The glass is always perfect in the end.