I watched the houses and trees fade as if into a glass of milk as the airplane ascended into the cloud. I watched the whiteness grow brighter and brighter as we climbed through the bank and broke into the sunshine above. Then I turned back to my book, a collection of essays by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist.
Mr. Pamuk writes about Istanbul with the same particularity James Joyce used to describe Dublin or Jack Kerouac did Lowell. Again on the ground, I logged onto Google Maps to see the neighborhoods, coastlines and islands described in the pieces I’d read.
I decided to float over to Vermont and see my neighborhood. The photograph you see there, for now, was taken Saturday, 7 May 2005. You can tell because at the University of Vermont horticulture farm, you can see the crew from Branch Out Burlington! planting trees in the nursery, as they do every year on the first Saturday of May. I ascertained the year by the absence of additions to certain of my neighbors’ houses and by the presence of the little blue car Adrienne used to call “Travis” in our driveway.
I decided to visit West Irondequoit, where I grew up. Kerouac, Joyce and Thomas Wolfe would be jealous of the ease with which one can go home again, sort of, today. A Google Map trip to the old neighborhood is like going to a high school reunion, checking up on my past without the risk of embarrassing myself. I zoomed over the early spring treetops of my youth – perhaps this photo too was taken in May 2005 – when I was stopped short by a brown smudge of earth. Parkside School was gone.
How could they have torn down Parkside? It was so new. At least, it seemed new when I attended kindergarten in 1966 and ‘67. The cornerstone, if I remember it correctly (Google is no help on this point), said the school was built in 1958. How could something still new in 1967 have grown old in the space of my life? The whole thing seemed insulting.
I was no longer floating above the trees. I was sitting on the ground with my feet splayed out beside the muddy rectangle. Nothing grew on the former school’s footprint, it was gone so recently when the photo was taken.
Tearing down Parkside was – and is – a personal affront. It was the scene of one of the great misadventures of my youth. Just a few weeks into that kindergarten year, I managed to wedge my left index finger in the hinge of the heavy bathroom door. The door closed on my finger and with too much pain and too little patience, I pulled off the tip. I bled all over my teacher, Mrs. Sibs. She turned white when she opened the door and the tip of my finger fell out.
There was an ambulance, red and cream-colored with tail fins. I lay in back, swathed in a plaid blanket with my left arm extended over my head. Mrs. Sibs rode in the front seat with the tip of my finger in a teacup. There were doctors and bandages; the tip of my finger was deemed too insignificant to reattach. Mr. Whiting, the school superintendent, came to our house that evening. He left relieved to learn my parents did not intend to sue.
I always assumed the finger incident made me part of the lore of Parkside School. Ever after, I’m sure, kindergartners were warned to “Be careful, a boy once lost his finger when he got it caught in that door.” Likely, the passing of time both discreetly faded my identity from a particular person to “a boy” while inflating my injury from a fingertip to the entire digit.
Looking back to Google Maps, I see the house that was Janet Zeitfogel’s still backs up to the schoolyard. Every day for the rest of kindergarten, she would ask me, “How’s your mashed finger?” I learned to avoid her and took pains to point out that although there was similarity to our names, we were not related.
Now it’s gone, somehow. I wonder what happened to the smell of Parkside School. I suppose it left during demolition, the way a soul leaves the body at death. If I close my eyes and don’t move, I can still smell it, paste and wood and wax and disinfectant. I can still hear the echo that was peculiar to Parkside, a building with too many smooth surfaces.
My official association with Parkside ended in late spring 1967, but it was still a block from my house. My friends and I played sandlot baseball and pickup football there or just lay on our backs and looked at clouds. I must have 12 when I saw the broken window as I cut through the playground on a summer day. Big, gaping hole. I walked over and thrust my head and shoulders inside and had just seen the softball on the classroom floor when my brain registered the sound of a car engine shutting off. I withdrew my head just as the police officer was exiting the vehicle. He let me go after frowning at me for five minutes and writing my name inside the notepad he’d taken from his shirt pocket.
In later years, we would swing from the rope on the flagpole or sit on the swings on summer nights (with girls, if we were lucky) drinking illicit cans of Genesee beer or climb onto the one-story roof and jump off and run away when a police car turned the corner onto Hunt Lane.
One Halloween, a neighbor caught me at the fence line with a slingshot, aiming for the floodlight at the corner of the building 20 yards away. He needn’t have bothered. I probably could have stood there until Thanksgiving, and used every stone in the vicinity and still not hit my target.
I rarely went inside Parkside School between 1967 and 1979. I turned up in the cafeteria one morning in early November of the latter year to cast my first ballot in a not-very-thrilling election. I was happy to be there just the same; to give my name to the ward clerk and have it found in the book, to finally enter the voting booth with the striped curtain and the rows of levers and the big handle one pulled to the side to finish the process.
I learned two of my neighbors, Jack DeWeese and Ned Junker, used to compete to be the first in line to vote every year. West Irondequoit is that kind of place. I still associate civic pride with those clear, cold mornings, frost on the grass and the last leaves of the year clinging to twigs.
In the summer of 1980, I worked as a security guard. One of my first assignments was to patrol the halls at Madison High School. School was over, for the year and forever. Madison was to be torn down after 50 years and the school district didn’t want anyone vandalizing the building before it could be demolished. A fellow guard, a white-haired older man, was a Madison graduate and he walked the halls in disbelief that his alma mater was doomed. I was 19 and thought the place – built in the Depression – looked old and battered.
Had Parkside survived, it would have been (I think) 50 this year. Low-slung, with red bricks, big windows and white gravel on the roof, its Sputnik-era design would no doubt seem hapless and outdated to a teenager.
My hair is white now, but if you ask me a question involving right or left, I will rub my left thumb across the tip of my forefinger, because I lost the tip when I was still learning left from right. On reaching middle age, Orhan Pamuk observed that time’s hold on us was not so strong when we were young. Whether we were happy or sad, we assumed we’d be in that condition forever and so we were shocked when things changed. Parkside School was part of my youthful assumption of forever and now I’m forced to remember that forever is not stasis, but change.
Life From Above
I watched the houses and trees fade as if into a glass of milk as the airplane ascended into the cloud. I watched the whiteness grow brighter and brighter as we climbed through the bank and broke into the sunshine above. Then I turned back to my book, a collection of essays by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist.
Mr. Pamuk writes about Istanbul with the same particularity James Joyce used to describe Dublin or Jack Kerouac did Lowell. Again on the ground, I logged onto Google Maps to see the neighborhoods, coastlines and islands described in the pieces I’d read.
I decided to float over to Vermont and see my neighborhood. The photograph you see there, for now, was taken Saturday, 7 May 2005. You can tell because at the University of Vermont horticulture farm, you can see the crew from Branch Out Burlington! planting trees in the nursery, as they do every year on the first Saturday of May. I ascertained the year by the absence of additions to certain of my neighbors’ houses and by the presence of the little blue car Adrienne used to call “Travis” in our driveway.
I decided to visit West Irondequoit, where I grew up. Kerouac, Joyce and Thomas Wolfe would be jealous of the ease with which one can go home again, sort of, today. A Google Map trip to the old neighborhood is like going to a high school reunion, checking up on my past without the risk of embarrassing myself. I zoomed over the early spring treetops of my youth – perhaps this photo too was taken in May 2005 – when I was stopped short by a brown smudge of earth. Parkside School was gone.
How could they have torn down Parkside? It was so new. At least, it seemed new when I attended kindergarten in 1966 and ‘67. The cornerstone, if I remember it correctly (Google is no help on this point), said the school was built in 1958. How could something still new in 1967 have grown old in the space of my life? The whole thing seemed insulting.
I was no longer floating above the trees. I was sitting on the ground with my feet splayed out beside the muddy rectangle. Nothing grew on the former school’s footprint, it was gone so recently when the photo was taken.
Tearing down Parkside was – and is – a personal affront. It was the scene of one of the great misadventures of my youth. Just a few weeks into that kindergarten year, I managed to wedge my left index finger in the hinge of the heavy bathroom door. The door closed on my finger and with too much pain and too little patience, I pulled off the tip. I bled all over my teacher, Mrs. Sibs. She turned white when she opened the door and the tip of my finger fell out.
There was an ambulance, red and cream-colored with tail fins. I lay in back, swathed in a plaid blanket with my left arm extended over my head. Mrs. Sibs rode in the front seat with the tip of my finger in a teacup. There were doctors and bandages; the tip of my finger was deemed too insignificant to reattach. Mr. Whiting, the school superintendent, came to our house that evening. He left relieved to learn my parents did not intend to sue.
I always assumed the finger incident made me part of the lore of Parkside School. Ever after, I’m sure, kindergartners were warned to “Be careful, a boy once lost his finger when he got it caught in that door.” Likely, the passing of time both discreetly faded my identity from a particular person to “a boy” while inflating my injury from a fingertip to the entire digit.
Looking back to Google Maps, I see the house that was Janet Zeitfogel’s still backs up to the schoolyard. Every day for the rest of kindergarten, she would ask me, “How’s your mashed finger?” I learned to avoid her and took pains to point out that although there was similarity to our names, we were not related.
Now it’s gone, somehow. I wonder what happened to the smell of Parkside School. I suppose it left during demolition, the way a soul leaves the body at death. If I close my eyes and don’t move, I can still smell it, paste and wood and wax and disinfectant. I can still hear the echo that was peculiar to Parkside, a building with too many smooth surfaces.
My official association with Parkside ended in late spring 1967, but it was still a block from my house. My friends and I played sandlot baseball and pickup football there or just lay on our backs and looked at clouds. I must have 12 when I saw the broken window as I cut through the playground on a summer day. Big, gaping hole. I walked over and thrust my head and shoulders inside and had just seen the softball on the classroom floor when my brain registered the sound of a car engine shutting off. I withdrew my head just as the police officer was exiting the vehicle. He let me go after frowning at me for five minutes and writing my name inside the notepad he’d taken from his shirt pocket.
In later years, we would swing from the rope on the flagpole or sit on the swings on summer nights (with girls, if we were lucky) drinking illicit cans of Genesee beer or climb onto the one-story roof and jump off and run away when a police car turned the corner onto Hunt Lane.
One Halloween, a neighbor caught me at the fence line with a slingshot, aiming for the floodlight at the corner of the building 20 yards away. He needn’t have bothered. I probably could have stood there until Thanksgiving, and used every stone in the vicinity and still not hit my target.
I rarely went inside Parkside School between 1967 and 1979. I turned up in the cafeteria one morning in early November of the latter year to cast my first ballot in a not-very-thrilling election. I was happy to be there just the same; to give my name to the ward clerk and have it found in the book, to finally enter the voting booth with the striped curtain and the rows of levers and the big handle one pulled to the side to finish the process.
I learned two of my neighbors, Jack DeWeese and Ned Junker, used to compete to be the first in line to vote every year. West Irondequoit is that kind of place. I still associate civic pride with those clear, cold mornings, frost on the grass and the last leaves of the year clinging to twigs.
In the summer of 1980, I worked as a security guard. One of my first assignments was to patrol the halls at Madison High School. School was over, for the year and forever. Madison was to be torn down after 50 years and the school district didn’t want anyone vandalizing the building before it could be demolished. A fellow guard, a white-haired older man, was a Madison graduate and he walked the halls in disbelief that his alma mater was doomed. I was 19 and thought the place – built in the Depression – looked old and battered.
Had Parkside survived, it would have been (I think) 50 this year. Low-slung, with red bricks, big windows and white gravel on the roof, its Sputnik-era design would no doubt seem hapless and outdated to a teenager.
My hair is white now, but if you ask me a question involving right or left, I will rub my left thumb across the tip of my forefinger, because I lost the tip when I was still learning left from right. On reaching middle age, Orhan Pamuk observed that time’s hold on us was not so strong when we were young. Whether we were happy or sad, we assumed we’d be in that condition forever and so we were shocked when things changed. Parkside School was part of my youthful assumption of forever and now I’m forced to remember that forever is not stasis, but change.
© Mark Floegel, 2008