It was blocked. I couldn’t park my car anywhere. It was weird driving down Olive street, and up Philadelphia. I had only ever been a passenger up these roads, sitting in the front and back seats, never behind the wheel. I walked these streets, several times. I know them and I know them almost intimately. My feet were 12 years old when I last walked them, the way I did today. 12 years old. I don’t even recall what my thoughts were at 12 years old…
Every lot had barriers. I could not see many other cars along, trying to park in them. Me, in my white Hyundai, just tried to find a place off the property of my childhood to park in. I ended up finding a space at the tiny, square, central park on Bailey street. A space I could have for two hours. I had just finished my breakfast. My heart and stomach were full, and luckily trash cans were not hard to find. I dumped my garbage neatly and set off with my water bottle, cold from being in the morning chill of the car. I wore my bright red jacket. I figured, wearing my old black one would make me look shady. Shady. As if a tiny, weak, skinny, child-sized young woman could be seen as shady. It was also the jacket that made me look sad, poor and the eye passed over me in my black jacket more than my red. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be remembered.
I walked, made my way safely down Bailey and then Painter avenue. I used the crosswalk and waited and walked calmly at my own pace, out of great respect for the way the entire behavior had been taught to me. I was walking toward where I had been taught that behavior and had followed its rule.
I reached Olive street. It was pale, cracked and thin, almost sickly. If weeds had greeted my shoes instead of clear sidewalk, and well-groomed foliage, I would have thought it was lost to disease. Odd. It was, strange, I swore the sidewalk was thinner than it was before. It was never this small. The thin tree branches were never this close to my head, as I whisked past them. Up the hill I kept going, with my hands clutching my water bottle and keys in my pockets. It was a warm morning, but the air felt new. It felt familiar. I hated these trees’ blooming red blossoms. They scared me, I remembered, because they attracted honeybees by the dozens. Having been stung as a small girl, right in the very grounds I was approaching, I recalled my fear of the little buzzing wings. I didn’t like these trees no. I tried to avoid them or look down when I used to walk down this way.
There were birds chirping in the distance. Someone’s power tools were loudly grinding away in the depths of the small tucked-away spaces of one house. That’s right. Houses one after another, the size of June bugs lined Olive street. It was like they were the audience peering at the large lot and children’s school only five steps across the thin one-lane road. I smiled at the path I walked as I got to the lot’s cemented wall. A memory shot into my head at the speed a bullet might. I laughed to myself, passing the wall which was only as tall as my mid-thigh. “I must have really been tiny, if I remember hiding behind this.” I told myself. I was alone, save for the man walking his dog opposite of my direction, only three eons before. I had even forgotten what sort of dog it was.
My eyes beheld the lot, empty of cars. It was like a grey field, with the old cement parking blocks poking up like decaying gravestones. I was looking at it all. I had to stop. I needed to take it into my eyes. I needed to know that I was feeling. There was the music building, where there on the steps overlooking the preschool, we dropped our egg-protecting inventions for science. I must have made mine out of pipe cleaners, glue, popsicle sticks and a toilet paper roll with additional tissue paper and cotton balls to cushion the egg. I chuckled at the thought that I had been taught to understand the principle of physics in the fourth grade.
And there, inside the music building, which now looks like a great, rusting, white boat swing, Dr. Cook had taught me to read sheet music one summer. I never kept that skill. I wish I had. I remember being so proud. It was like I had unlocked a door, or I had seen into a world where I could comprehend sound visually. I think it felt like learning to read again. It must have felt that way. Back where I had just came from, past the music building was the Chapel, and beyond that, one of my favorite places on the campus, The Shannon Center. The Chapel was small and dark, but full of color and memory. I used to sing with other kids in the music building, and sometimes we performed in that Chapel. I was in a choir. I was a choir singer, and I wasn’t even singing for God in his home. I was singing for Dr. Cook, in his. And he was proud of me. He was proud of all of us. We sounded unified. Like one child to represent all. I never thought it was a powerful feeling. Children are not taken seriously. Even as a kid I believed this. Thinking back on it now, I never listened to our sound. I just sang. I just followed as directed. The sound that came out of my throat back then was temporary, and I thought I would hold that sound forever. Now lost, my voice is older. It’s grown more tired and soft, like thin hay instead of young velvet grass. I stopped singing in a choir when I was 12, maybe 10. I think my last performance was in that small, dark brown, pillar of a chapel. There I laid my voice before that altar, and offered it to time, which He took and set upon the shelf of my memory.
I found my eyes scanning back across the barrier to bar the entrance to the parking lot. I caught sight of the mosaic. My class’s gift to the school. The mural made of cement and colored glass covered the wall of the building I spent 5th grade in, and 6th grade. A big lettered BROADOAKS hanging squarely above the design, which was a long, colorful ribbon behind the school’s insignia, a broad oak. A mosaic tree in the center stood with its roots being the words, “Class of 2006”. I remember hating little glass squares so much while we made it. I remember working on the end of the ribbon, and on the letter “R”, and on the tree, or what was left to work on of it. I remember that project taking weeks. I remember wondering when it was going to all be over. There were other class gifts there in that space between the school and the office. More mosaics in a uniform group, and less complicated stuck on the wall opposite, on the side of the building I must have spent 5th and 4th grade in. Was it, Los Lobos room? I think it might have been. I wished I could be reminded. The garden too was a class gift before my graduating class I think. And those circular, clean, new, umbrellaed patio tables sitting by the fence, must have been a newer class gift.
Everything looked well there. Hardly weathered at all.
I made my way to the walkway up to the front office, a light, sunny little building where I recalled often waiting for my parents to pick me up whenever I was sick, or injured, or needed to go home early for reasons not of my own fault. It was small and cozy, and I had a little corner with pillows, magazines and toys to play with and look at, and occupy myself with, so as long as I was polite and behaving. The lady there, she had glasses. She was short, and had blonde hair that sat on her shoulders. She always dressed nicely. She always greeted me, and asked me things and talked to me. She knew me, and I missed her. She was like a golden lamb behind a desk full of paperwork, letters, phone calls and office supplies. I’m so sorry I don’t recall her name. She was no teacher of mine, but I’m sure she watched me grow just as they did, and knew me just as they all did, with the same amount of joy in her smile. Sometimes more. My heart was aching. I hoped she was in.
I strode up to the door beyond the welcome mat, and saw all the notices. Notices of social distance procedure, mask-wearing and campus safety. I looked then at the hours of business, with a phone number at the bottom for inquiries after business hours. I read Monday-Tuesday, and Wednesday-Thursday, and then Friday, all having hours open and modified for 9am through 6pm or so. It was almost 10am, but it was Saturday. They were closed. Perhaps someone was there, but, I didn’t knock. There was no point. I had no business there, and if I had, I would be likely directed to call and leave a message. Truly, I had no business there, but, I wished I could have said “Hello.”
I then decided to make my way back down Olive, with every intention of leaving. I was probably trespassing. Still, it was barren, with not a soul in sight. I reached the beginning of the lot’s tiny wall, and stopped to look down at it all. There was no way any cars could even drive through there, and I felt the warmth of the sun against me, shining. The sun seemed to urge me to draw in closer, and visit the buildings it touched as it touched me. I gripped my keys in my pocket and took a deep breath. “What could it hurt?” I told myself. Without another thought to convince me otherwise, I stepped over one of those cement block gravestones and into the lot.
I saw the ghosts. Traffic cones lining the way. It was the drop off again, and there were cars and kids and waves goodbye and lunch-pails and umbrellas and sweaters falling out of the cars. There was skipping and the safety of the teachers ushering us all across the street to stay beside the road as we got over to the courtyards to prepare for class and role call. My feet stepped across the graveyard lot, eyeing the places I ran, and the places I walked and the cars I moved past in my past. It blew my mind that there were hardly any lights in the lot. There wasn’t a need. Daylight was all the light that mattered.
I saw the preschool. My second soil-bed, but one rich with nutrients and water. There I had really taken root, beyond that pine green fence with the pine green shady cover around one side of it. There I recalled being a seed with a sprout coming out of my core. There I remember so much. It began to hurt inside me. I couldn’t look at it all at once, or I’d surely collapse into tears. Buckets of tears. I faced opposite, at the kindergarten and the entrance to the courtyard in front of the office’s garden alley. I stopped in the center of the flatter part of the lot. I was about to leave. Was it always so small? I could swear it was once the size of a stadium.
If I was going to leave so soon, I might as well look upon my kindergarten’s ground once again. What had changed? And what hadn’t? I made my way up the steps instead of climbing the curved pavement’s end. The metal staircase railings were still green. I traced the large square ends of them with my eyes. They were a pale pink once, I think. I remember the day they were suddenly all painted green. I felt betrayed that day. No one had gotten my permission to change them green. I liked green better, but still, in my young mind I felt someone should have at least had asked me first. I climbed those steps slowly. There were only five of them. Were they always so small? So small…
My smile bounced back to my face with the sun, when I saw the rusty brown storm drains in the cement. They were like old friends on their own, welcoming me back, warm and clean with the day, as if to say, “Hey! You’re late for class!” Then they would smile up at me with a look of surprise. “What are you doing here? This is so unexpected!” they might have said. I remembered the sounds they made when I stepped on them, and the puddles that circled into them when it rained. I remember losing coins in them and throwing rocks into them. I kept walking with a nod to their firm posts, kept true as always.
I peered nervously into the courtyard then. I wasn’t sure if anyone was watching me from somewhere, and wondering why I was creeping in on the property. Some little woman in a bright red jacket, standing around, loitering perhaps, maybe looking for children, or for something to steal. But I stopped in place when I saw the only change to the courtyard. Beyond the short chain-link gate, there was a wide courtyard, with the buildings surrounding it like fortress walls. Those buildings were my progressing soil-beds. One for 1st grade. One for 2nd and for 3rd. One for 4th and for 5th, and the last one was reserved for the 6th and final grade. You see as I grew, my roots would hit the ends of the soil-bed there, and had to be moved fairly quickly to accommodate my growth. I was a small seed. So many seeds around me were larger, and more clean and more intricate and stronger. But my sprouts were pure, and they were vibrant and rich. My sprouts were among the first to show.
And at the heart of the courtyard, was a great offence. A giant plastic umbrella where my childhood tree once stood. That great tree was the beating heart of natural shade overlooking all the children which stood within the walls of the school. It wasn’t an oak, but it was large like one. It was tall, and beautiful and teeming with leaves for us to collect and toss like confetti. That tree had seen me come and go each day. It saw me eat my lunch under its high branches, on the blue picnic tables around it, and on its very wooden borders surrounding it. That tree saw my eyes and my face, and my smile and my laughter. It saw my pokemon and yu-gi-oh cards. It saw my drawings and my projects. It saw my tears and my loneliness. It saw my every trip, fall, jump, dance and skip. That tree silently held me in secure comfort, that I was protected and that I was never alone, not when I could look up into the scattered light in its leaves with wonder and love. Now gone.
I was disappointed that an umbrella of all things took its place. Then again, I didn’t know the whole story behind the tree’s huge absence. Maybe it was too dangerous for kids trying to climb it. Maybe it had gotten infested with rot or fungus or bugs and was deemed unsalvageable. Maybe they just didn’t want it there anymore, and had it removed. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I was just sad to see it gone, before I could say goodbye to it and sit underneath it one last time on a fall morning. The pain in my heart returned.
I moved away and looked over at my kindergarten house. There was a sight that dominated all. The playset, still there from my childhood. It hadn’t been repainted or removed or changed in any way. I heard the laughter of ghost children echo in my head. I saw them kicking up the woodchips they ran across. I remember curling up in that foggy plastic bubble next to the slide. But it wasn’t the playset that caught my attention suddenly more. It was the fence on the wall against the incline of the gate entrance. I laughed, out loud. “I remember this! Oh wow, I forgot.” I spoke, as if to someone else. But there were only the ghosts. “I remember going home and standing on the wall, holding that fence and seeing how far I can jump down from it. Like, ‘look at me, I’m so high up’.” I remember my mom sometimes stopped me before I could even reach a jumping point. I remember my dad catching me as I jumped into his arms and held my hand to walk back to where he had parked. I remember his green Chevy pickup truck, with the furry dusty grey upholstery and the long, thin, black stick-shift that was between me and him in the driver’s seat. I remember the shoes I skipped to the car with, A Bug’s Life light-up heels. I remember his moustache over his smile, and his tall black hair. God! How old was he? He must have been in his mid-thirties. I’m only a decade away from that…
I moved past the wall and looked at the wooden picnic tables where I once I pretended, I was stung by a wasp at lunch, when actually, my feelings had been hurt and I wanted to justify my pain by saying I was hurt physically. I remember playing pretend pokemon with my classmates in the woodchips, and coming home with them in my shoes and on my socks. I remember that house. It was so huge back then. It looks like a little white cottage. It looks just as it did then. I don’t remember what the inside looks like. Had I been able to go inside, I’m sure all of my memories would get out of their beds to greet me. But only one was waiting for me. A faint one. The memory of a small cozy nook at the back of the house, filled with pillows and books. I remember first learning to read and write at the end of kindergarten. I remember one of my first places of comfort and serenity came from that nook. I was so comfortable there. I was ready to learn anything there.
Chicka-Chicka-Boom-Boom. Would there be enough room? For all the letters of the alphabet to fit into a single palm-tree? The memory of that book suddenly came roaring out, charging at me like an oncoming car. I’m not sure if it was the first book I had read, but I recall it in both preschool and kindergarten, and I recall loving it so much, mom had gotten a copy of it just for me to have and to hold at home. Somehow, learning the alphabet was its own story, with each letter having a place, a personality, a lowercase buddy, and a happy end. I adored it. Yes, I think I must have learned to read in kindergarten, when I was no older than 4 or 5. I had learned to write too. Though not as beautifully as others. My sprout needed to expand then, and into the fresh, new, spacious, fertile soil-bed of 1st grade. Coincidentally, it was probably learning to read that led to me needing glasses during the first grade.
I could have walked out onto Philadelphia from there, but I needed to walk back and face the memory of preschool head on. I turned around the way I came, and I walked back down the dark asphalt staring out across the parking lot, the green graves for Staff and temporary parking only stared back at me. I looked at my feet carrying me there slowly. We must have played with chalk where I was walking. We must have splashed in the rain when it rained here and showed how fast we could run from one end to the other.
I crossed the way to the preschool, and bravely peered at the closed doors of the entrance. There was a gate before that, with a hatch high enough for only adults to use. Though clearly meant for child incarceration, I never saw this place as an institution. I saw it as a second home. As a place where I would grow faster and dream while I was awake more than I would asleep. A place I could reach as far as the moon and stars, and actually touch them, and give them hats and kisses. I saw the poles outside the doors I would spin and run around while I waited for mom and dad to stop talking to the teacher and hurry up to get the gate so we could go. I saw the single step where I would hop down from, as if jumping off a cliff onto the ground below like a hero. I saw the grass where I would run and stick my arms out, to pretend I was an airplane or a bird, overlooking a massive, long hill. It was all so small. Why is it all so small now?
It must have been only a space of 15 feet at maximum. I stood frozen in awe at my ghost. I was so unfathomable. I was a toy of a girl, a real living doll. I was impossibly small. How could a child that tiny have a mind, have a spirit greater than that of the clouds in the sky? How could I have been so free? How could I have been so happy, so remarkable? How could I have been so blind to it all, but seen through to the heart of everything my eyes touched? My eyes. They must have been so precious, so sweet to hold in a gaze. Back then, my eyes must have looked like big cinnamon saucers, pure and clean and free of anything but curiosity and understanding.
I needed to press on. I wanted to see the playground from the back. The playground of the preschool was where many of my earliest memories are tucked away safe and hidden. Had I been allowed inside, I would have been met with more memories no doubt, of the book fair, or AM and PM activities before and after school-time. Though my reminiscing and my walk was cut short.
I had planned to walk about the campus to the swim center and track, where the youngest of my older memories lived. However it was around the bend of the preschool building that I had been approached by Mr. Campus Security on a golf-cart. He was there to ensure no one was trespassing, and to notify me that campus was closed. I could understand of course. I knew Broadoaks was on campus property. Ha. My whole childhood was spent on a college campus. How about that.
I told him I knew and I was just leaving. I was just walking by and wanted to check out my old stomping grounds. “I grew up here, quite literally.” I told him. He replied something along the lines of, “Oh, I’m sorry to ask you to leave, but you really can’t be here. No one is supposed to be here.” I understood completely and thanked him before he went on his way and I went on mine. I turned to see the gate that the playground was behind, and it was covered up with green mesh, with vines or leaves painted along it, just like the side. It was then, walking away from it all that I felt the largest, most painful tug of all. Something dug into my eyes and pulled out water I hadn’t known was in there.
I don’t know if it was Mr. Campus Security’s words that stung an opening for them, or if it was the fact that I was leaving my memories behind so soon. I didn’t know whether to take offence to the bitter escorting of me away from my old home, or to chase my heartache for the joy I held within those walls with shrill pleads of forgiveness. To say, Forgive me please! Forgive me for never giving you the respect and gratitude you were owed. For never thanking you for all the opportunities, and privileges, and encouragement, and nurturing you gave to me. I couldn’t wait to leave because of the way the majority of my peers treated me. The way you treated me Broadoaks was only with unconditional love. There is no God, there is no Jesus. There is only you and your staff, which took me as a seed, and helped me grow for as long as you were allowed to help me grow. It may have been only ten years, but they were the longest ten years of my life, and some of the best years of my life. They were the years of my happiness and company. They were the years I felt the least alone. They were the years I held confidence like a parade baton, and where I had grown my own special blossoms from my sprouting leaves. You were the place that made me possible. Heaven help me, I miss you.
My feet took to the wider, smoother sidewalk quickly. I fought my tears, barricading them from leaving my glossy eyes, as if holding back a wave of water. I had the strength, but I knew I wouldn’t for long. I walked past the lawn with the chapel front overlooking its hilly mall. The grass was still so green and trimmed. The barricade was busting. I stopped, standing still like a fool about to watch a tsunami barrel towards me with a fury. I shook my head and I smiled. The memory was wedged from my recollection.
“We did something here.” I said aloud to myself. I saw no small ghosts on the lawn, save for one of me among my peers as older kids. “We did something here,” I repeated to myself, “Right here, on the lawn. By that tree. It was something. We were all here for something…but for the life of me, I can’t remember what!” I laughed at my silly attempt to unclog that memory, an attempt made in vain. I watched the ghosts, all dressed in nice, semi-formal attire. I saw Kevin, and I saw Esteban. I saw Anthony and Spencer. I saw Darren, I saw James and Gregory. I saw Julie and Breanne. I saw Maureen and Gina. I even saw Matthew and Caroline. My friends, Paige and Justine, and Shelby, my closest friend without so much as a fight between us. I saw them all. And I saw me, under that little pumpkin spice colored tree which threw the placid, pure, clean mall of grass off a smidge. I saw me, staring out at everyone and at me standing there. Something about this place had nothing to do with my fondest times, nor my most memorable moments. I can’t put my finger on it, but it would seem that I sent this memory to be recalled for some reason. Like an important letter sent out for the future, it found its way back, but the writing was illegible and faded. All I can feel is pained love. It burns and suffocates like a heavy smoke, and causes my eyes to water. We did something there. For music? For our graduation goodbyes? A simple roll call for a drill? Picture day? I can’t remember.
I couldn’t remember. I had to yank my eyes away from my ghost’s. They looked far too distant and mature to be mine at twelve years old. They couldn’t have been those same brown saucers that once blanketed everything in wonder and smiles. Those eyes saw me from so long ago. They saw me, standing here alone and understood. They held me one more time, as if to say, “I’m still here, and so are you.”
I tore my eyes away before any more bittersweet drops could soak my blue disposable mask under my eyelashes. I walked down Philadelphia and I didn’t dare look back. I let the tears leaking through fall, but shut the barricade closed. I laughed and spoke to myself in an attempt to comfort myself. “It was a dumb idea….What’s wrong with reminiscing anyway? I’m safe, I’m not bothering anyone. There’s no one here…but, I shouldn’t be here. I was stupid, it’s Saturday. I have work. I needed to walk.”
I made my way back to Bailey again, once more obeying the safety rules of pedestrian rights. I marveled at the boring renovations of the California Grill across the street, and I recalled taking a 6th grade photo there with my class right in front of the sign. We all ate there before leaving Broadoaks…that’s right. Mr. K had us do the math for the check. I didn’t though of course, I just ate.
I crossed paths with a young woman and her dog on the winding sidewalk back, under the row of trees. She had the same expression Gina or Maureen would have had upon seeing me back then. A cold, dismissive, fleeting look of pure rejection, which only lasted but a second as she walked past. And I chuckled to myself. It might have been the look they pass on to either of their daughters no doubt. And they would be the ones to have kids of their own, that behave just like them. I could see her being annoyed with any crying I might have decided to show, or a display of jealousy in a glare. I thought her dog was beautiful though.
As I walked back to the park where my car was parked, I felt a sense of numb calm. I held no tension in my hands anymore. I don’t even know why I took my water bottle. I didn’t drink a drop. I got in my car and drove my way back home. As I started driving up Mar Vista to Colima, something happened. The barricade was giving away. I wasn’t in time to bolster my strength against the flood, and with single additional apology to absolutely no one, it broke apart.
Pouring like blood from a deep cut, and flowing out without any regard to my own wellbeing, the tears came. They were warm and familiar, as if pulled out from a drawer full of albums and trinkets long forgotten. But they were also new, and so very strong. I could not stop them, even with all my strength. There was no point in trying to put them away again. I didn’t even know where they came from in the first place. My heart in my chest felt as if it was wrung dry. It ached as it beat. Not a physical pain, but a dull, receding pain, which slashed like a razor, thin and stinging. I cried more. I sobbed. I wept. I cursed. Then I cried again. I couldn’t go home like this. No one should have had to see that mess. How would I even explain it? It was too much. I had little time left to myself.
I had parked by the mall in La Puente to wait it out, and let my tears pass safely. Crying on the road isn’t practical during any time of day after all. Not to mention, if it impairs vision, it is a hazard. I didn’t know why I was crying so much, and why it was hurting me so. I never felt anything like it, only perhaps in my imagination. But unlike pretend, it felt raw and it felt mellow. Instead of a dramatic, loud, passionate cry, it was slow and fading and worst of all, lingering. I then opened my eyes wider at the realization of the curtain being pulled back, at the description to the vocabulary word being revealed in my mind’s thesaurus.
It was mourning. I had never mourned anyone to the fullest extent of cries and apologies and cherished memories and blissful appreciation. I have yet to mourn the deaths of anyone in my childhood. Not my grandparents, not my aunts or uncles or cousins. Not my parents. Not even my closest friends or teachers. But this was mourning. This morning, I was mourning. These were tears of grief. I was mourning Broadoaks. I was mourning the great tree in that courtyard. I was mourning Olive Street. And I was mourning my death as a child.