Corridors

 

Maybe you remember days when you were shorter. When Henry Huggins was a hero and Ramona and Beezus were good friends.

When school was spaghetti in the lunchroom that you could smell all through the hungry mornings, as the scent wafted through the corridors of whatever school you attended, and mingled with the smells of ripe sneakers and blackboard chalk.

Maybe you remember too the alarms that rang out over the loudspeaker system that brought the principal’s voice into your classroom every morning somewhere between roll call and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Or maybe it came in the form of the bells in the hall.

And maybe you remember trooping out of your classroom to stand facing the corridor walls, rows upon rows of young girls and boys, awash in terror laced with ennui, hands crossed behind their necks.

If you went to school with me it was the lovely tile-lined walls of what is now one of the county buildings, but was then an elementary school, that you stared at. The scent of impending lunch was all too often tempered by the threat of looming war.

I'm sure those bomb drills of childhood were as futile as they were frightening, but last midnight when Google saw fit to awaken me with the announcement that new time zones were available to me….as if one wasn’t enough for me to sleep in….I remembered those long ago days....probably because the events we are seeing remind me of them, and not in a good way.