School.
Love it or hate it, most of us have 'been there, done that'.
In my hometown, the Whitmore School on 6th Ave SW felt like an extension of our home. With a shared toilet for 400.
It loomed large and foreboding across our narrow asphalt street my entire childhood, and I oft times felt it a portcullis to my Camelot-esque kingdom...but mostly it felt like a convenient extra room where we got to see our friends. It was approximately 6 car lengths from my front doorstep...or 2047 dill pickles laid end to end. This is a guess as we only had one car... and I hate pickles. 😉
I saw it in from the dining room table as I ate breakfast, lunch and supper. It was in my peripheral vision as I watched the black and white visages of The Beverley Hillbillies, Hockey Night In Canada and Linus Westberg in our living room. It greeted me every time I stepped outside, and when not inside it I was often running around it, using it as a jungle gym.
It wasn't just the grandiose backdrop on the stage of my world, it was my Adventureland.
*The Whitmore from the front...way before our street was built.
*From the back; you can see its little sister a wee bit on the bottom behind it. If you jumped right over the small school, you'd land on my roof!
The Whitmore was actually adouble act. The beautiful old multi-story stone building was given a younger, modern sibling at one point, plunked down mere feet ahead of it, and it was a one level, plain-roofed building that looked like an elongated shoe box lined with windows, stretched to almost the full length of the block. The two structures could not have been more dissimilar. Stoic/Old Majestic Stone vs Geometric/New Modern Wood. My siblings and I lost so many tennis balls, baseballs, golf balls and frisbees on that damn flat roof that we could have easily opened a sports shop atop it and made a killing. Black's Cycle and Sporting Goods would have been nudged right out of business!
We had a ladder at the ready to clamber up to retrieve the latest football, birdie, boomerang or whatever...but after the older kids left home or started dating etc, it was up to me to play retriever. It was scary as hell going up, and dizzyingly impossible to get down. I did it exactly one time. That roof ate up a lot of my meager pocket money, replacing whatever got stranded.
Grades 1 to 3 were in the new school, and grades 4-6 were in the grand one that looked like a castle. I distinctly remember the butterfly-stomach thrill of knowing I was going to the Big School, as we'd dubbed her. How lucky was I to step up in the world like that! I must be a bit of alright! Even Princess-like should one's imagination drift...
But pride cometh before the fall.
One of my most distinct memories of going to school is the acquisition of my forehead scar. A hole-punch divot the size of an apple seed a inch or so above my left eye. (If only it had been lightning shaped, right? 🗲 Dammit!)
At recess, students had to play outside. In cowboy movies, herds of cattle frantically push their way through corral gates in a mad throng, smelling freedom in the air, and that was basically what happened after the recess bell sounded. I survived that just fine, but coming back in was another matter. At the sound of the bell, we all had to line up in orderly fashion at the front door steps. For whatever pre-teen reason, it was a BIG deal to be first in line. The quest for this coveted position saw students taking off from the playgrounds at breakneck speed, vying to be #1 in lineup. I was never fast enough. And I didn't have bribery money or a henchman to trip up any frontrunners.
But one day I devised an ingenious plan: I'd forgo any of the pleasures of recess and hover close to the front door steps, so at the first note of the bell, I'd be there to step smoothly into first place. And it worked! Dozens of kids had to stand behind ME! I peeked over my shoulder and basked in the blazing green heat of their jealousy as they strained to see who'd won. I was in my glory...until someone at the back of the line shoved someone in front of them and a domino effect rippled until it hit me and I went head first into the edge of the concrete steps.
Shocked and embarrassed, I quickly got up and told the teacher at the door I was just fine, but her face went pale and the look of horror on her face told me otherwise. I was sent upstairs to the principals office, thinking my short reign as Recess Queen, unscrupulously attained, had put my head in a guillotine. But a wet cloth was placed on my forehead instead, and as I held it in place, I found the cloth couldn't get near my face as it rested on a ridiculously long bump! It likely only protruded a couple of inches out, but it felt a banana was sticking out of my head. There wasn't much blood so I was sent home and sent to bed. In retrospect I should have been checked for a concussion and received stitches but I just slept... no doubt dreaming of how I'd one day regain my title and stand proud once more at the helm of the recess line. Wearing a football helmet.
Other memories are are vivid and almost tangible:
* pulling off your socks and shoes, climbing up the long steel tube that was the fire escape at the front of the school. The summer warm, metallic smell tingeing your nostrils as you climbed barefoot to the top; toes spread-eagled, fighting for purchase, fingertips grasping for the shallow riveted inner-seams that held it together. At the very top, sitting on the small wooden lip that protruded from the tiny locked door that fed from the building, I'd sit with a fist full of dirty, sweaty gravel and toss it down the tube, watching the rocks bounce madly about, rattling like a machine gun, deafening and brilliant! Then a quick slide down, only to turn around, shove more gravel in your pocket, and begin the slow crawl up again. Best to be alone, not having to suffer the pain of taking turns.
* somehow having a mini-tin of aspirins and tricking my crush, the exotic sounding Andre Lemieux (no ski or chuck suffix! What?), that they were candies. Convincing him there was a tasty middle inside them, he ate a few and the rest is a blur. I think he either got sick and I was sent off to San Quentin, or I was found out and sent home with a note. Either way, I was a little shit for doing it. Not a malicious act...just empty-headed stupidity. With absolutely no concept of consequences. And I can't be sure, but that may be why he never returned my 9 year old Undying Love! And I also learned two valuable lessons: 1) the need and appreciation for Empathy 2) the power of Persuasiveness
* being so excited for the elective music class where, having chosen a smaller version of the violin my dad had, I sat in the front row of the Grade 3 assembly and waited breathlessly for instruction. I never told my father I was going to learn to play. It was to be a surprise, with me dazzling him with my virtuoso performance someday! The teacher called out our names, and upon reading mine, looked at me and said loudly "Your sister couldn't play...you won't be any better. " I felt my face grow tight and hot, and I froze on the spot. Then, ashamed, I got up and left. 50 years later, it still hurts.
* Grade 6 gave us a new young teacher, Miss Prokopchuk. Her not being a 'Mrs', it was hard to remember to call her Miss. And OH! was she not indeed Barbie pretty! Teachers thus far had been the standard older, married, thickening women with short, over-permed hair and black rimmed glasses, with hemlines below the (apparently) lust-inducing knee and necklines modestly covering anything that even remotely makes women female. But now we had a young, slim, casually dressed lady with a bright smile and knees we could see. She had a loose, stylish head of soft blonde, sunny hair and one just knew she must drive a baby blue convertible that matched her fashionable V-neck dresses! I adored her and debated failing that grade to do a repeat... but then thought better of it. I had a crush to stalk!
The lovely Miss Prokopchuk
* Halloween was the best time of year at school because we got to wear our costumes to class and have a party. My go-to costume was being a hobo, complete with 5 o'clock shadow, and lunch packed in a hanky hanging from a stick that I carried over my shoulder. Once, instead of walking home, I decided to show off my great outfit and stand in front of the kids waiting in lines for the bus. I pretended to be looking for someone ...enjoying the attention, kids pointing at me and smiling in what I thought of as 'wonder and awe'. However, the smiling turned to outright laughing, and perplexed, I looked around to see what was SO funny. And looking down, I discovered the source of all the merriment: my hobo pants, miles too big for my skinny frame, had shed it's poorly knotted rope-belt and had fallen shamelessly down to my ankles. I was standing in front to busloads of kids with my faded, hand-me-down undies in full view. I hadn't felt the breeze on my legs, likely due to my being warmed by misguided hubris. I picked up the treacherous pants and Usain Bolt-ed it home, all the wiser to the hazards of ego.
All in all, the Old Whitmore was, more than anything, my Garden. My Greenhouse Nursery, if you will. The seeds for my love for writing were first planted there; the first sting of that thing called love were nettles grown there, and I began to learn that like a garden, a school was populated by strange, surprisingly different living things that were in themselves fascinating, but together made up a special place to grow. Being a common flower that is also a weed, I think it's safe to say I was the daisy of the Whitmore School! *shrug* It's also safe to say that if Miss Prokopchuk was the beautiful rose in my garden, my malevolent elementary school music "teacher" was definitely Western Skunk Cabbage...😒
I have very few, dull recollections of the demolition of the Big School, but no doubt life-altering things like watching Get Smart, parading up and down main street with Marianne Kereliuk or riding my bike down to Bum's Jungle took precedence over the murder of my mountain.
*sigh*
Sadly, we tend to value many things in our lives much more once we leapfrog 50. Or if we've just been released from prison. Either way, George Bernard Shaw said it best: youth is wasted on the young.
Waves of nostalgia wash over me at the site of old photos of The Whitmore and I'm left to wonder... why didn't I have shorts underneath those hobo pants? *smile*
