A Pleasant Sunday Afternoon

I went to visit Pleasant Township Elementary School on Sunday afternoon with my mom and N--. It is one of four or five schools in my hometown that will be closing this year due to declining attendance. I had attended elementary school there from 1975 - 1980, and my mother went there as a first-grader way back in 1942! The cliché is true: everything does look smaller! It was nice to walk the halls again after 25 years... It was rather strange to walk in old classrooms and see them changed around -- with computers and everything. You see, the rooms had been perfectly preserved in my memory all these years and it was kind of a shock to walk into my sixth-grade classroom and not see Mr. Holcomb at his desk or to see the library bereft of the paper mache statues that Mr. Bertolini's class made. Somewhere deep in the back of my mind I thought I would see my friends like Mike, Tim, Brian, Shannon, Bobby, Rick and Robbie -- but that was a long time ago. I didn't expect it to be that emotional inside that building... and I realized that perhaps elementary school was the last time I actually felt good to be myself and to just be happy.

I had a few great memories come back to me:

• Herbie crawling under a table, covering every square inch of his skin with chocolate pudding, then jumping up and yelling "I'm a negro!" (remember, this was like 1976.) Hilarity and punishment ensued.
  
  
• Cub Scout Pack meetings in the cafeteria.
  
  
• The best pizza in Warren was the kind our lunch ladies made.
  
  
• Learning how to play chess from Mr. Bertolini.
  
  
• Dressing up like Pilgrims for a second-grade play. (The other class had to dress up like turkeys!)
  
  
• The principal, Mr. Marino, doing these 1930s-style radio shows over the PA system.