The 20th Century brick schoolhouse

I attended from kindergarten through senior year is slated for demolition. (No, I didn't cause any lasting damage to the structure. Honest: the school's demise wasn't my fault.)

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I've been revisiting old yearbooks full of photos of people who grew up, married, and sent their kids to the same small-town school they'd attended. Familiar family names and resemblances to uncles, aunts, fathers, and siblings are all over the pages of old black and white photos.

Familiar--and yet,

I never belonged in my own time. In my head I was somewhere else, long ago and far away, or light years away in a future I was supposed to attend but I had lost my ticket. It wasn't a conscious thing. It was a general detachment, being "tuned out" rather than tuned in. I was lost, out of time, out of place, separated from whatever people or beings I must have belonged with.

I was ostracized or ignored by my classmates. I didn’t want to dress like them or do what they were doing. I couldn't follow their conversations for long before drifting off into my own world in my head. With my own sisters--five of us all barely more than a year apart in age--I felt alien and out of touch. Much of my childhood was spent in a chair in a corner, alone with my books. In fairy tales, I felt at home. Fairy tales were full of misfits, magic, and happily ever after.

I learned to like the music and TV shows my four sisters loved, but antique stores, vintage photo albums, and the "Golden Oldies" radio station felt much more like "my" time and place. Stores and shopping malls held little that I wanted. This was the era of polyester, psychedelic prints and colors, palazzo pants, maxi and mini skirts, halter tops, hippie beads, bell bottoms, platform shoes, blue eye shadow, shag carpet, the velvet Elvis print, and other phenomena that defied explanation.

Photos were taken with cheap Kodak Instamatics, faded and out of focus. (I married the guitarist, in part because we never met each other until 1985.)

For hours I'd stare at the 1950s yearbooks of my parents and think that was the way people were supposed to look. The 1960s and 1970s hair, fashion, furniture, and architecture felt alien to me. Old photos of ancestors I had never even met, or met only as frail, stooped, wrinkled elders, felt more like my contemporaries than my actual peers. I never asked why; I simply felt a kinship with people who had come and gone before my time.

These looked like the people I was meant to be with. Never mind they were teenagers in WWI and I was a child during the Vietnam war. On the left, back row, my mom's mother; front row, bottom right, my mom's father.

The present wasn't a bad place to be.

I knew the past wasn't "better"--they didn't have telephones, radios, TVs, paved roads, cars, refrigerators, running water, indoor plumbing, or electricity. The people were not "better." But their faces in old photo albums seemed to be calling me home. I don't believe in ghosts or reincarnation, but I like to imagine ancestral memories can survive like radio waves. Or maybe it's epigenetics. Maybe our best memories are somehow encoded in our DNA, and an occasional grandchild arrives in this life remembering a world that is gone.

What if some kind of interference from a paranormal radio signal was messing with me? Misfits cannot help but wonder why they don't fit in. The most common explanation doesn't explain much:"You are an old soul.” I was born with a sense of nostalgia for a time, a place, a people I had never seen, yet it seemed more familiar than the world I was in. At a party, I would gravitate to the old ones rather than people my own age. Other people's memories, and even more so, fictional stories of other lives, seemed to displace my own, and I had many gaping black holes in my mind. I was disengaged from my surroundings, living in another world in my mind.

My mom's accidental double exposure--yeah, the birthday girl was me

"Immediacy" and "agency"

are words I would later learn. From infancy, I had lacked agency; I passively watched the world around me, feeling out of place, instead of actively engaging in it; I missed out on immediate people and events. "You were there," my sisters would say. "How can you not remember this?" And whatever "this" was, or "who," it was elusive. Groping in the dark corners of my mind for memories of some specific event I had actually attended in real time and real space, I came up empty. To this day there are events I am told I was physically present for, but my mind was so far away from it all, I cannot remember my lived life. In first grade, when Mrs. Hoffman punished me for daydreaming, I was trying to remember the life I was meant to have in some other universe. No, I'm not saying I was smart enough to articluate such thoughts in my uncrowded little mind, but those inchoate ideas were taking form while everyone else learned to stop counting on their fingers. (Who else remembers the hand slaps, the No-Fingers Law in math class?)

Now that I am more than half a century old,

now that I have seen the dawn of a new millennium and the reality of such wonders as "the picture phone" once predicted in some far-off future, I prefer to believe I am simply weird.

Bobi skyping our daughter

It's better than imagining I was sent here by mistake

to occupy a body I wouldn't have chosen--call it bad karma or a fluke of metaphysics or a magic spell gone wrong. Maybe most people are comfortable in their own skin, while I was somehow dysmorphic, watching for a portal and a return trip home. I've had a fascination with doorways and tunnels, windows and winged things all my life. While Mrs. Hoffman was telling us how to do our math worksheets, I was riding a dragon or a space ship somewhere far away. When I went to her desk saying I didn't understand how to work simple arithmetic, she'd spank me, in front of the entire class and say "they" paid attention, so they knew what to do, and so would I, if I ever quit daydreaming.

She died of cancer in later years. That, too, was not my fault.

A new century arrived; our last-century school building is now condemned,

facing a wrecking ball in the all-too-near future, and suddenly this place I felt so detached from feels like an important locale, a childhood home, a fixture that needs to be preserved a little while longer. One more generation, at least. But the body count is too low. The children didn't stay close to home and send a new generation to that little school. They grew up and moved to bigger and better places. Me, I never moved more than 90 miles away, though I've lived in other galaxies and ancient kingdoms of Middle Earth in my mind. I'm the one feeling like an amputation is about to sever me from the schoolhouse where my entire childhood was lived, or un-lived, but it was where my body was stationed, and enough of my mind tuned in, I developed a sense of nostalgia for this old place.

Also, this "Old Soul" is becoming more of a child with every passing year. I buy toys for myself. Ostensibly, these toys might be for the grandchildren. I am blessed with two, and they are beyond perfection in ways only grandchildren can be.

(WARNING: all the dinosaurs are MINE.)

I am blessed, and I knew it all along,

Blessed to be alive on a beautiful earth with blue sky, green grass, a farm, a family, and more than enough food. My biggest fear in childhood was not that I would never achieve great things. It was that I might lose what I had and treasured, in abundance. Studies have shown that the number one fear among children is losing their mother. My mom's mother died when Mom was a baby, and she somehow made this a fact we knew from our earliest awareness. She was never bitter, but that void in her life was as real to us as an actual grandmother would have been.

Mortality was part of our lives, all our lives.

Not "morbid," really, so much as an awareness we were mortal. A boy at school was hit by a car and killed at age eleven while crossing the road to get the mail. Tim Curry. My sister's classmate. I would never forget him to my dying day. I could not imagine losing a brother just like that, without warning. A life snuffed out in an instant, without warning. Somehow it did not surprise me all that much when I lost my sister. Julie was almost 19; I was 13, the fourth of five sisters. Why shouldn't one of us die young? We had been blessed with sunshine and good earth and a colorful childhood on a farm. Nothing good can last forever. The mystery wasn't that one of us had been taken from the world; the mystery was why Julie, not me. She was so enthusiastic, so alive, so fully engaged in this life on this planet; I was the one staring at our dead ancestors in old photos feeling estranged from the people around me. It made no sense. So much about my world made no sense to me, though. Church was more inscrutable and unreaachable for me than school had been, but after losing Julie, I started to find my footing and figure I had a place here, whatever the heck it might be. It was no overnight revelation. My awareness dawned more slowly than a spring thaw after a long, hard winter.

I was not alone

when it comes to losing a loved one too soon. For a school as small as ours, 25 to 30 people per graduating class, kindergarten through senior year all in one building, a statistically mind-blowing percentage of us died young.

Side by side in the yearbook,

The shortest (Julie) and the tallest (Carl) were "frenemies" before the term existed, relentlessly trading barbs with each other like a comic duo. They graduated together in 1975 and both were dead by the end of the year. Julie was murdered. Carl crashed his car into a bridge.

These four classmates, and far too many others, were dead before age 50:

Some of our bus drivers, much to my surprise, are still alive today:

Plainfield Community School, you had a good run. I'm sad to see the old building go empty. If I walk through the hallways one last time, I will see Julie and Carl, my dad and his buddy Wayne at age 18, and all the little kids who grew up and left their rural homes for greener pastures. The first school already burned to the ground. The 1960s version also has become last-century and has outlived its use. What will take its place? um, how about a portal, or a launch pad for a spaceship....

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Formic Frolic by Teresa Tunaley, cover art for 12-Dec-2013 Perihelion Science Fiction

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Don't worry, be happy! You are here, we are here, and we BELONG here!

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This is my 5 minute freewrite thanks to @mariannewest - prompt was schoolhouse

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