The violin section, 7th Grade Orchestra, detail from the annual school photograph, Fremont Junior High, circa 1966-67

An old friend scanned and sent me this remarkable image.  Remarkable because of what I am able to remember, seeing it again after all these years.  That's me, front and center, turned away from the camera.  Apparently talking.  Not remarkable, because I am told this was typical of me, turning around and talking at the wrong time.  

Remarkable on the other hand, when I think about it, that I ever played the violin.  Remarkable because I wonder how many small town schools even have orchestras anymore. Or music and fine arts programs.   

Every small town I ever lived in -- and I have lived in a few -- had a school in the center of town, often on the town park or close to one with a fountain and old trees and a Civil War monument and occasionally a canon, spitting distance from a church or two, a library, sometimes even a courthouse or a jail.  I have been informed that this particular school, the one in which this photograph was taken, is for sale now, and since no one is likely to buy it, is almost certainly going to see the wrecking ball fairly soon. I confess I have mixed emotions about this news.  I have not set foot in the building since I left on the last day of the ninth grade, turning away and not looking back.  I do not remember my time in that place being especially happy, but apparently good things did happen to me there.  I played the violin and learned about music, for example.  I was apparently good at some things and bad at others.  Apparently I also talked, so apparently I also made friends or else I wouldn't have had anyone to talk to.  So I must have been happy some of the time at least, or keeping myself busy at any rate.  And in this fashion I survived adolescence.

What is remarkable to me is how many of these old schools end up this way, which is to say losing their purpose and being torn down.  They start out as such noble structures, at the very heart of the community.  Imposingly brick with stone trim and porticos and lintels and Ionic or Corinthian pillars here and there, classical entablatures, large windows and doors with transoms, the works.  They start out, built in the nineteenth century, built at the turn of the last century, built in 1904.  They start out as the town's high school.  Then they're downgraded to junior high (PC: "middle school") when a new high school is built outside of town in some local farmer's spare corn or sugar beet field.  Eventually the junior/middle school follows and the old school is converted to low-income housing or some other vague "community center" use before it's finally such a momunmental white-elephant eye-sore it's razed and replaced by a parking lot.

No, I'm not going to get all symbolic here but you know I'm not making this up.  You know as well as I do that it was already happening when you and I were in school.  We were all moving to the suburbs, moving out of the hearts of these little towns, out of the drafty old houses, churches, schools, all those places you could never heat or go broke trying to and god forbid you should ever attempt to air-condition them, so out to the suburbs, out to that split-level with three bedrooms two and a half baths and attached garage, out to getting into trouble in the woods near the parking lot behind the new high school, out to unchaperoned shenanigans in the cul-de-sac, out to the mall, out to the big box stores.   

Sometimes we moved so far out there was no going back, and you've seen what's happened to those little towns, or what's left of them.  Not all of them, of course.  And perhaps with the reversal of fortunes these days there will be another shift.  Abandon the malls and abandon the suburbs and regroup.  Go on back into town and rethink what we've done, maybe. Come back to the five and dime downtown, downtown.  Maybe even a shift in consciousness too, while we're at it.  

All I'm saying, really, is: space and place matter.  Geography matters.  Buildings and rooms matter.  Architecture affects the mind.  Where we went to learn things affected how we learned to think and behave and be, and where we send our children affects the way they think about themselves and how they think about their relationship to their community, their country, the world and their place in it.  Good and bad.  Right and wrong.  

Send your kid on a bus into the heart of town where he can walk from the school to the library across the park and find books that will open up his heart and his mind to whole other ways of living and being, or send him to the mall outside of town, where he'll learn all sorts of other ways of living and being.  Your pick.  There are distinct advantages to both, I assure you.

Move the school.  Move the library.  Brick up the library's front door and move the entrance around to the back, next to the parking lot.  Symbolic?  Really? You think?  Regardless of how you think about the past, I will say it again: space and place matter.  It's how the mind works.  You will make associations in your mind to where you were when you learned of this or that, when you were happy and sad, when you loved and hated, when you were hurt and comforted, and you will love and hate the places you were when it happened, even when the feelings are long past and even forgotten and the places have ceased to exist.  Even when they're gone, you will see where you were in your mind.