Schoolhouse

First in memory that comes,
rising is perhaps not even my memory, but that of childhood story books and later Laura and Mary attending with candy-bitch Nellie, the T.V. episodes that showed that normal father’s had beaming smiles, a Pa who could also whip little girls soundly. Especially, the ones who thought to think on their own. But, this TV dad always dusted his hands of plowing dirt, rode into town to settle an injustice, especially if it involved any of his little girls!

But, my own memory of school’s were those of modern, choking sprawl, built in the nineteen sixties, and seventies, acres of basketball asphalt and soccer lawns, plenty of teachers, but no recess duty, they drank coffee in the faculty lounge. School’s with their long halls of high windows and the scrape of rough red brick, their classrooms each wing a hidden moving side of octopi tendril, all arms reaching out and out and out away from the heart of the animal, the office, the library, the cafeteria, those places one was afraid of, but could be saved by, excited to go to for meals, or anxious at check-out’s, awards, Chile and donuts on a snowy Wednesday afternoon. All those people smiling and bouncing in the soft center and I was being bruised by the new teacher, end of an arm, blonde and glowing, there were coat lofts to hide the sucking.

Schools haunt me, never go away, they are a loaded apparatus of terrific trauma and jungle gym and muffled screams and far-away voices, something I hope to be able to embrace, release, run away from, never enter again, be bestowed and endowed with the highest of degree’s, never smart enough, always too deaf, too dumb, too weak to hold up that boundary, a crossed two of swords the tarot reader shows me on youtube. Just learning to crawl she says, brand new in your ability to sacrifice no-good- situations in your effort to love yourself. Just beginning, here at fifty to shakily hold up those swords I wasn’t able at nine. And, almost every night, I dream of school.

Photo Credit: Kyo Azuma/unsplash