A Triptych of My Husband's Hometown (panel three)

A final look. The mystique is already fading. It feels like that episode of Star Trek where Bones puts on this helmet of supreme knowledge (actually looked like an old beauty shop hairdryer with Christmas lights poked through it) and becomes vastly more informed, but only temporarily, the "knowing" fades with time. An apt comparison to have come to mind, as today I shift from looking at the changes in our cultural lives to the changes wrought by the passage of time.

In days gone, Grayville had a movie theater. Now it has a building that looks like a movie theater, but is actually a community center. (What else do you do with a defunct movie theater if you can't bring yourself to tear it down?) It's old-styled, semi-circular marquee shows what happens in this place. One side is bare, blown away in a storm, its naked framework exposed for all to see. But the other side is intact and announces the community's cultural events such as dates for high school plays and the summer arts camps. In this place, life's storms are not hidden. Here history is not set aside so completely. Change incorporates the broken remains of former life, and new uses are found for old foundations. That unabashed naked exposure of old afflictions alongside new life built on former purposes and left-over strengths: this is an element of the old world that has not made its way into the new world. Soren Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forwards, but it can be understood only backwards." It seems that the new world is good at operating in the first part of this quote; while the old world is good at the last part. Both stand defensive of the part they're good at and regard each other with suspicion.

I watch my children play at the park in this town, and I am thankful that they move freely between the ancient rusty monkey bars and a new bright plastic tornado slide. Something feels right about this arrangement. Is this how we honor our parents? Is it not so much about what we do for them as it is what we do because of them; what we do with the view we meet in the rear view mirror and how we travel forward in our awareness of it?

On the way to the park, my husband pointed to what once was a railroad track through town...the railroad has been gone close to 20 years now; but it, too, is not forgotten. "I remember the bike ride to the park seeming like it was miles and miles long. We'd take a short cut down the tracks there and just hope a train wasn't coming." More comments like that one streamed from him to the children. This had not happened so freely before. He is teaching them another part of loving childhood, the remembering part.

Then, as we sat in that park, watching our children play, and reading--we would sometimes pause and reflect. "Nothing in my past prepared me for the world I'm in now. It seemed like people presumed that because I was competent at some things, I was competent at anything," he mused. It was like the people who ruled his childhood assumed the transition into adulthood would happen as naturally as one breath follows another. But this was not the way it happened at all. I thought about this a bit because I, too, grew up in this old rural world.

I think time and growth here in this place are like a river that is full of people. They make up a community that flows across time...and they know this. There is no abrupt change in the channel of experience as it flows from one stage of life to the next nor from one generation to the next. You have a generation flowing ahead of you that has already floated the path you're on. They are telling you where the current changes, where the rapids are. And you have a generation coming along behind you, and you turn and holler back to them. You tell them what has been called to you, what you have then experienced, and what you will now pass on. There is a natural hope and peace and security in this familiar pattern of living. And age and position in life have no bearing on this transfer...as long as you stay in the river. Portage off to some other place, and the river people are clueless what to tell you; and they feel like the river will die with your leaving. Something in the fluidity of time as it flows over people is lost when you leave. Unfamiliar stresses spring up in the dry ground you have begun to travel. But you know this leaving is in your destiny, because even there, in the homeplace, the river is going to change and grow strange. Maybe not this generation. But it is coming to be sure. We saw this the evening we went sneaking into my husband's old abandoned high school.

We ended up at the high school when we were driving around, killing time while waiting for our take-out pizza to bake. We pulled alongside the old building; and my husband pointed to windows, telling us what was in each room. "The school was small enough that we only needed one room per subject," he said. There was the math room, the home ec room (consumer science as it is now known,) and at the far end was the gym.

He pulled the car around behind the building. In the back, the grass was tall and wild, trying to reclaim the ground space it lost years before to cement, back in the day when the school made a valiant effort to become part of the new world, as most schools will attempt to do; but twenty years of not being a school changes a place. As we looked at this side of the building, we noticed the glass back doors were shattered and standing wide open.

Elijah said, "Oh, Dad, can we go in?"
Scott and I looked at each other. "My parents would have taken me. They did take me exploring an old abandoned church one time," I said.
"Come on," Scott said.

So we picked our way through crunchy shards of glass and up the steps into a building. It greeted us with the smell of every musty year it had stood alone. Not even a hint was left of the varnished wood and fresh paint smell, the hallmark scent of old schools. But the steps up to the central hall and down to the basement still stood just inside the door. They were still painted red along with a red fire door that looked practically new. Glancing up, I saw multi-colored layers of paint pulled and frayed, hanging from the ceiling. I wondered which layer of color my husband saw when he walked these halls as a student, but I didn't ask, for he was already forging his way down the hall.

"It's so small, even with all the lockers gone!" he exclaimed. A thought returned to me that had visited me before--back when he spoke of his lengthy bike ride to the park, a short distance in reality. The thought was that our frame of reference for extremes gets so much broader as we age.

The flooring tiles, once stiff and shiny, waxed and seemingly impermeable, now were curled and brittle. They rocked beneath our feet as we stepped on them. The math room still had a blackboard, but it was filled with obscenities. It seemed a room more fit for use in a Stephen King novel than for use by a student learning quadratic equations. Another room, whose original purpose escapes me for now, was stacked floor to ceiling with plastic twin mattresses--35-40 of them. They were stacked haphazardly and looked like something from a bizarre dream. In the stairwell--rather than a dropped and forgotten notebook or rusty metal lunch box as you'd expect--were the partial remains of a dismembered doll.

You see, the school did not go immediately from being a school to being alone and abandoned. It's "sickness" (asbestos) spelled its doom as a school, but the building still held a certain appeal. A cult group--Scott's mom remembers them as being associated with the Moonies--bought the property and used it for communal living for a while before they disappeared. Now no one knows where the leader/owner of the old building is; and the building is truly abandoned, with remnants of both its glory days and its strange days lying around. For instance, the kitchen side of the old home ec room still had tattered curtains at the windows and an old metal kitchen station at one end of the room, but these were not sufficient to stir visions of people learning domestic skills in this place. The other side of the home ec hall (the sewing side) was an absolute breach from the school's history. It had become the chapel of the latter group. Several old wooden pews were shoved into one corner, all but one that stood alone. It faced the pew group in the back and stood in a puddle of water, with the curled floor tiles looking like floating pond plants around its feet. The setting sun cast a strange golden light through the windows of this room.

We didn't trust the stairs enough to explore the upper storey. One room we'd entered had a collapsed ceiling all over its floor, so we dared not go stomping around up there. And the basement was filled with more of the rank old water, at least ankle-deep, beneath mildewed walls. It was too dark to see much, but we did creep to the edge of this cavernal pool to take a peek into the biology room and see the ghostly outline of a work station left in there; but like the kitchen, it was hard to envision students learning--particularly learning about the working of live things--in that place.

We left the main building and walked back to the place where shop class (now known as industrial arts) was held. This garage-like building was a lot less creepy. It was open enough for cleansing air to blow through it. In fact, it looked as if the equipment for class might have been hauled out only yesterday; and the day before that, class might have still been conducted. Scott really wished he could have explored the band building, but it was still locked tight, almost as if the domain of music was protected from the worst of the shame that had come upon this place, but then again I being a musician would see it that way. (smile)

We had seen all there was to see. We left. The thought came to me how great was the desolation that had visited that towering old building. Old timers would say, "We live in a fallen world." Oswald Chambers said (in my devo reading around the day we got back) "The basis of things is not rational but tragic..."

As we drove back to get our pizza, Scott commented on our exploring in the context of the rear view mirror quote I'd read him earlier in the day. "Much of my rear view mirror does not account for changes like these. We do see old things as close no matter how much they grow strange and far away from our brush with them. In time, they decay and lose their power everywhere except in our own minds. I'm glad I had the chance to have you and the kids with me when I saw the reality of what is actually there." I am glad we were there, too.