SCHOOLS OUT

It was a warm spring afternoon in mid May and 12 years of boredom, humiliation, and torture had finally come to an end.

I had graduated from Bloomingsburg  High School.  I had gone through the traditional meaningless ceremonies designed to cast me out into the world, ill equipped to accomplish anything useful.  Yale and Harvard were not for us.  Perhaps Ball State or a Voc Ed school but more likely, the farm, or if we were lucky, the Studebaker plant in South Bend.  Rock Solid.  They had made wagons for the Union Army during the Civil War.  A good dependable place to work.  In four years they would be sucked dry by the badly mangled Packard Corporation and cease to exist as such.  (At the same time I was learning from a very wise man that “Nothing is constant.  Everything changes”).

There had been 12 in my graduating class of a school that had balked at consolidation when that would have been the only sensible thing to do.  The premise being that a basketball team made up of five relative dwarves could overcome all odds, beat Gary Roosevelt and do a repeat of the small town Milan upset of 1954.  Never in your wildest dreams!  They wouldn’t even make a movie out of it.

Behind our house there was a summer kitchen with a leanto woodshed attached to the rear.  It was an easy climb up a farm gate and onto the sloping roof of the shed.  From there I could climb up and hold onto the peaked roof of the summer kitchen.  It faced the South and caught the warmth of the early spring sun.

I don’t think I even changed from my good clothes but I remember that after the last hurrah of the class of 1958 of Bloomingsburg High School,  Bindweed County’s best and brightest, I went home and climbed to my favorite spot in the warm sun.  There, shielded from the house, I could meditate in privacy. 

At 17 I had my whole life ahead of me.  I remember standing there on the weathered wood shingle roof of the woodshed, staring at the back of the farm where it bordered Sheid’s Woods and thinking over and over “I am free.  I will never have to go back to that place again.”