Coffinberry School

My friend, Dolly, who lives in Washington (state) and is a writer sent me at my bequest a memory of Coffinberry School where we attended elementary school, she and our friend, Debbie, one year behind me.

I'm going to make up some copies of Dolly's story and give them to the "Coffinberry kids" at my September 2014 reunion.  Maybe they can add to it with their own recollections?

Here are some snippets that would be of more interest to the broader audience of this blog:

"I remember that in 3rd or 4th grade, we had a teacher named either Mrs. Riggs or Mrs. Briggs.  It was said of Mrs. Riggs/Briggs that she'd once been a dancer in Las Vegas.  And so, ever after, I had this picture of her, kicking up her legs and showing her garters, like a saloon girl in westerns.  It was a happy picture.  I liked her, she was pretty and nice and young and different.  I probably gossiped about her -- the price of fame!  And here she is, all these years later, remembered because she was different.  Glamorous, like a movie star.  I picture her with long, curly red hair, but that could just be me, wanting to paint on some color.  She was radical, in her way.  I'll bet there are "boys" who remember her still.

I didn't like gym class.  Swimming was the only sport I got any enjoyment out of, and there was no pool at Coffinberry.  There was square dancing, though; it was actually a part of the curriculum in, what? 4th, 5th, 6th grade?  I liked it better than volleyball -- for a while, anyhow.

I remember having to back out of a classroom once, when I laughed so hard that I peed my pants.  I wish I could say this was in kindergarten or 1st grade --- but it was in either 4th or 5th grade.  (Oh, maybe 3rd, I don't know; I don't want to know.)  I waited for everyone to leave before I exited the room.  I don't remember if I had a coat to cover it, if anyone saw it, commented on it, or how I got home; I just remember the horror of it all.

I was exceptionally naïve and idealistic as a child.  I thought every kid I knew came from a happy, normal family. I think I was jealous of that.  I think that's why I could sometimes be unkind.  It took being treated that way myself in later years for me to begin to understand it.  What goes around, comes around.

(Dolly rented a car when visiting a friend in 1982; she returned to her former home and her former neighborhood.) 

One day I rented a car and drove to my childhood home.  Both my parents were dead and the house had been recently bought.  I parked on the street, in front of the house that Judy Porter, and later, Essler Shank, lived in.  No one answered when I knocked on our door, so I rounded the house, snapping pictures.  Then I walked from there to Coffinberry Elementary.  It was August, the heat like a fist.  The street and the houses were very much as I remembered.  Well-kept homes; tidy lawns (though not so green); curtains pulled against the sun.  And it was so quiet, just my sandals tapping on the sidewalk.  I didn't see a single person, not even someone driving by.  I WANTED to, I wanted some sort of human connection, but it wasn't to be.  Finally I reached the school.  You know how they say things look smaller when you revisit them as an adult?  Well, it wasn't that way for me.  Everything looked the same, especially the school: long and low, unprepossessing.  Probably there were changes, but if there were, they didn't register.  It was closed, of course; I peered through the steel-enforced window of the front door, gazed down that shiny, gray corridor, and knew just what it smelled like though I couldn't smell a thing.  I know the school is gone now.  I'm glad I was there in 1982; for whatever reasons, I really needed to see it.

As a child, I had a book by A.A. Milne, called, "Now We are 6".  When I was six, I thought the whole world was contained within the streets, the people and the school of my childhood.  I thought I owned that neighborhood and always would.  I don't know if I ever completely stopped thinking that way until that visit in 1982, when I walked that same route, on the very same sidewalks my feet had trod 4 times a day, 2 semesters a year for 7 years, and felt not a scintilla of ownership or belonging, or even love.  The philosopher Heraclitus said something like, You can't put your food into the same river twice, and I guess that applies here, too.  At least that's how it is for me.  How it has to be."

Dolly, Debbie and I went to the same school and yet our memories are quite different.  I'm not entirely sure why and perhaps I can chalk that up to the fact that life in Coffinberry wasn't very happy for me.  It started out okay in first grade, but with my ADD and all, I just didn't find my legs in that school. 

That's another thing to write down on your "bucket list."  Visit your old elementary school if it still exists.  If you walked to school, try walking the same route, like Dolly did.  Let yourself remember the little you.

I thank Dolly for sharing with me.  She is probably one of the most honest, caring people I've ever known.  We've been friends since I was five and she was four.  That kind of thing doesn't happen all the time.  Thank you, God, for Dolly.