Well, this last week has been an extremely interesting experience for me. I got to go back into a building that I had not set foot in since 1975. 36 years it has been for me. This great old middle school, where I pulled five years, from 3rd grade to 7th grade. Still quite a child in those days, and not yet ready to go to BEC and the one grade they had there; the 8th grade, nor wonder why that 8th grade was all by itself; neither yet high school nor any longer a children's school, like this one...
This particular school started out as Bedford High School, then became an elementary school, and finally, it is a middle school. Thus, in its vast career, it has housed students from the 3rd grade all the way to 12th grade graduation.
The school is one of those massive three story ancient brick affairs, with an actual full size Greek revival front entrance, worthy of any Grecian city-state. I recall reading somewhere that each of those tiny square pegs that you see in the photograph is actually a representation of the ends of great wooden beams that used to support these massive isosceles triangular rooftops. These exposed wooden beams were not needed on this modern -day building from the 1900's, they are not the ends of great pieces of lumber holding up anything; they are instead just decorations, representing the real small square ends of great lumber as they would have appeared on the actual grecian temples... Yet, there they are. Truly, we worship the ruined without reason!
I remember being smaller, much smaller, and actually growing taller year after year as I attended this school. I remember my third grade classes and how small I was, then. How big my winter coat felt, and how it was almost a space suit to get on and off. I remember the first time we used small lined notebook paper, and real ink pens! No more stupid first and second grade CANT ROLL crayons (large tubed crayons with a flat side, so they would not go rolling off the desks and which were about as subtle, artistically, as a chainsaw in surgery). No, we had real pointed Crayolas and real things to color.
An eighth grade picture of me at football practice at BEC, with Paula, one of our cheerleaders. Circa 1976. This is what I looked like when I had gotten out of The Elementary School, and had gone to the Middle School of BEC (Bedford Educational Center). BEC was the former Susie Gibson High School, an all black school that they converted after Desegregation.
But while BEC has its own memories clouded deep within the coming-of-age ritual, it is the Old Elementary School that draws me; this ancient present-day "Middle School" (grades 6th through 8th), and in its beginning, as it says above the great steps, also once the high school, before it was replaced by Liberty High School in the late 1960's. I graduated from Liberty in 1980.
It is this great old Greek Revival American Colonial designed building that attracts me more than any of the others. This great old relic, so well preserved, and in remarkable shape, for one her age. I remember the fights the kids had, and where they were staged, and who won each of them, and that I recall being terrified of 7th graders, and their sizes, and their large, obnoxious ways. I did not have the sense year after year that I was getting any bigger, but that certain people were beginning to 'go missing' every year. Kids I had feared. I had no sense that I was getting any bigger, at all. Just that it was getting easier to get around, and I did not fear the older kids, as I had done. After 5th grade, kids generally let me alone. I had size, and that earned me respect. I began to be the protector for my little brother.
The place is so perfectly preserved, for the most part, that upon seeing any point of interest, for the first time in all of that length of separation, a great wave of stored information comes flooding back out, once again. The exact same type of tables in the cafeteria (could they be the actual period tables? They look too well preserved for that, but...). The great flat marble shelf that was so high to me in those days, now is at the perfect height to toss your books upon. Only now, there are lockers all around where kids can store things under lock and key. No lockers ever used to be needed.
The entrance into the cafeteria lunch line, so perfectly sized at the time, now seems almost funhouse 'small' in its tiny child sized dimensions. The wrapped brick wall out back was much larger in those days.
The small library upstairs where I once read R is for Rocket and S is for Space by Ray Bradbury. I wonder if those same books are still in there, any longer? If I could check them out, now, and read them again?
I remember which teachers had which class rooms and which grades they taught, 3rd through 7th... Names come flooding back as I walk down the gorgeously-ancient waxed stone floors of the hallways. Mr. Saunders, Mrs. Wilburn, Mrs. Sively, Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Wray, Mr. Norrid Davis, Mrs. Coles, Mrs. Jarvis, Mr. Langford, Mr. Hicks, Mrs. Brennan, Miss Wilson, Mrs. Fizer, Mrs. Dixon; I seem to have almost total recall in some areas of my mind. I know where their classrooms were in which they taught, and who was in which one, at the time. I can even remember some things they actually said...
