My Old School

The party tonight energized me, so sleep may not come. My muse can be a very inconsiderate person. There are nine of them, I tend to split my time between Calliope, Clio, Thalia, Melpomene, and Polyhymnia, so they keep me busy. 

The last time I attended a function at the lower school gym, I spent two days working up the courage to ask someone for a dance, who ended up not even going to the party. She didn't show up last night, either. Pretty inconsiderate, if you ask me. She got married about thirty-five years ago so that ship might have sailed.

Although there weren't many people from my class at the party, several of them had children who did. I hadn't seen some of them since I was a student at St. Andrews myself, so seeing the ghost of their reflection in the faces of their twenty-five-year-old child was haunting and melancholy but deeply touching. Soon, their faces will be reflected in the faces of grandchildren at our old school.

St. Andrews features heavily in my vision and hopes for Jackson and Mississippi. Their concepts and philosophy on education align closely with my own. I hope to become as useful to them as they are to me in time. 

They say your old school looks smaller when you return. St. Andrews looked considerably larger to me, probably because it actually is physically larger. I enjoyed making out features of my old school inside the physical plant that sits on Old Canton Road now, almost like counting the rings of a tree. Doors and windows and ramps and halls I passed a thousand times now share space with younger, fresher cousins. I'm actually quite impressed with how later architects made their projects fit in with the earlier structures. It looks like a cohesive whole, even though it was assembled in several pushes through the years. 

They also say you can't go home again. I don't think that's true. I felt almost hauntingly home again. 

I was drawn almost immediately to the spot where Timmy Allen used to sit during P.E. Timmy suffered pretty bad juvenile arthritis and often had to sit out some of the more physical stuff we did because his body hurt. He was my friend, and because my body had begun to become stronger and larger than my classmates, I imagined myself as his protector and phalanx. I found the spot where I used to sit and keep statistics of the girl's basketball team when I was their erstwhile manager. If a place can become a part of you, that place certainly is. I'm glad I went, both last night and when I was a child.