I go to my class and tests in an old converted grade school. I'm told that it's over 100 years old.
What gets me about it is that I just think about the children who used to attend the school. It has the old dark brown wood floors, black chalk boards, horrible circa 60s acoustic tile ceilings, and large wavy-glass windows. The bathrooms are in very odd spots throughout the building- which makes me wonder about all of those 6 year old bladders in days of yore. Maybe they had outhouses for the chilluns.
It's the kind of school that my grandmother probably attended- only her schools were all in Queen Anne, and this is in the U district.
It has that old school smell. Decades of the same kind of cleaning supplies, floor wax, and something that I can't quite define. When I was very young, I went to nursery school for a short time in an old high school. It was a scary Victorian building that I remember as very forbidding. I remember the wood floors, dark hallways and pencil sharpener in the hallway. They demolished it not long after I was first there as part of urban renewal.
I can't help but think about the little kids who went to school at this Seattle place. The littlest ones in particular. I think about what it would be like to walk through those imposing doors the first time. How the floors creak, and the hallways get ominously silent when the classrooms are occupied. How the sun crosses the room in the course of several hours. How evocative the smell is. (kind of like how universal the smell of college dorms is too- entirely different experience, but universal smell in my experience). I only hope that the kids were happy there. That it wasn't a crappy school.
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2 comments:
i think you may be over-thinking all of it. i went to school in a seemingly-scary old Victorian type home (in Romania) which looks to me now like Dracula's castle. In 1st grade, I remember, none of that shite was important. What really matter was playing football (soccer) at recess and at the end of the day.
we, grown-ups tend to analyze and philosophize junk to death, don't we?
I dunno- I thought the place I went to was really scary. I'd never been in anything like it before. I was thinking about that at this place too- these kids hadn't been exposed to large public buildings before- and it could be intimidating. The fear wouldn't last long, I suppose- they make friends easily and quickly- and that takes precedence over creepy buildings.
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