Cornerstone

Letter From Elba Announcement.  Dear readers, for the next two weeks I will be playing hooky.  I am skipping town and heading West.  In the course of my travels I hope to see some old pals, catch up with a Cali kid, gaze over a few golf courses and mountains, chill by a pool and eat an Apple Pan hamburger.

This marvelous adventure should give me a whole new outlook and I’m looking forward to every minute of it.  So miss me a little- and please look for a brand new Letter in your email box on Sunday, October 19.

(And hopefully by that time, Youtube, Google and Apple will have worked out the bug that prevents you from seeing the bottom film clip on an Ipad.  Again.  Sorry, guys.  I have NO control over this issue.  Watch it on your phone or computer.  It’s worth it.)

Thank you.

Author’s Note: This post is dedicated to my daughter, Natasha- and all good teachers everywhere.

And now take another kind of trip with me.  With school starting again last month, I wanted to re-enroll.

So get in my DeLorean time machine and turn the date dial back to September, 1955.

I’m in first grade at a little red schoolhouse called Avoca.  It’s an Irish name.

Another Irish name is Murphy.  As in Mrs. Murphy.  And she was our principal at Avoca.

She had first come to the district in 1932 and she stayed on for the next thirty-six years so things were done right and kids like me got a great education.

Avoca was a little red brick, forty-five student school house when she first took the reins. But by the time she retired as superintendent, the classroom population had soared from to 1530.  And one building had grown into three.

Avoca was the site of most of my childhood triumphs- and tragedies.  And the wonderful education I received there stood me in good stead as I made my way through the world of arts and letters.

In fact, I believed in the school so much that it was where I sent my two kids when their ABC time came.  All three of us even shared the same first grade teacher- Mrs. Dale.

I drove by my old school practically every day.  I loved seeing it.  A concrete symbol of many good things.

But in August of 1992, they started to tear my school house down.

I  had known about the asbestos problem that had precipitated this dreastic course of action.  And I could see a modern, high-tech building rising in its place.

But driving by, day after day, watching that wrecking ball destroy the repository of so many memories was painful.

When the demolition was finished, I felt bereft.  I had nothing left of the place.

And then one morning two women came to my door.

One of them held a brick.

I was instantly on my best behavior.  My visitors were Miss Ostlund, my third grade teacher, and Miss Milner, one of my junior high teachers.  They were on a mission.

They had salvaged twenty-five bricks out of the wreckage and they were giving them to former faculty members and students all over the country.  People they knew cared about the old school.

And naturally they had sent one to Mrs. Murphy- then a spry eighty-three years young and running things efficiently out in her retirement community in Lake Havesu City, Arizona.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, surprised by all the trouble my two former teachers had taken.

“When I saw the demolition I just couldn’t believe it,” said Miss Ostlund.  “There was the cornerstone of the building just thrown into the rubble.”

“So we took pictures and and we decided to salvage some of the bricks as a remembrance,” added Miss Milner.

My teachers had another surprise for me.

They had brought photo albums with them.  It seems that they had saved pictures of every student they had ever taught.  It was an archive of two lives devoted to young people.

(I squirmed when I saw my third grade self- pony tail, buck teeth, glasses and all.)

We reminisced about the good old days and the changes these two wise ladies had seen over the years- from school curriculum to the family structure.

Miss Milner reminded me that in seventh grade she had taught me to diagram sentences. Thirty years later, I finally got up the nerve to protest.

“I hated diagramming those sentences,” I complained.

The she reminded me of a grape shears that my mother had given her many Christmases ago.

“I still have it,” she said.

As Miss Ostlund and Miss Milner left to deliver more bricks to other former students in the area, we kissed good bye.

So many good byes.

Good bye to the building, good bye to the playground, good bye to youthful hopes and dreams.

Mrs. Murphy and Miss Milner are gone now.

But as I looked at my brick, I knew that old buildings, great teachers and childhood dreams never die.

They’re always alive in the place that matters most.