Caveat: Centering

I had a profoundly traumatic fourth grade year, split between Edgemere Elementary in Oklahoma City (for that half-year we spent there when Ann and Mara and I were staying with my grandparents), and Sunnybrae (which at that time was an elementary school – it didn’t change to a middle school until a few years later, just in time for me to attend there again in 7th and 8th grades).
I really hated my fourth grade year, although I remember being sort of friends with Kray, and close friends with Colin Brant and Tom McConnell.  But the following two years, for 5th and 6th grades, I went to “Centering School.”
I laugh it off sometimes, in trying to explain it to others who don’t know or understand what a Humboldt County upbringing can mean. “It was a hippie school,” I’ll joke. “We meditated after lunch, and they let us vote on what to study next,” I will explain laconically. The very last may be a bit of an exaggeration. But overall, they’re not inaccurate. And the fact of the matter is, they were the best years of my long, complicated education. I will remember teachers like Rita and Peggy forever. I still feel close to especially Peggy, who I describe to people using a word like “godmother” – she’s probably the closest thing I’ve had to one. Admittedly, Peggy was not just my 6th grade teacher, but also one of the residents of the extended A Street menagerie, and had been part of the community that raised me from infancy.
And my best friend was Steven Rossa. We used to stage mock battles in the halls, when Centering School was located at the Methodist Church on 11th Street, or go hunting evil villains in a sort of superheroes roleplay across the parking lot and around behind the buildings. The school was small, so what age you were meant little about who you hung out with… so it created a much more natural, human kind of interaction between the kids, with lots of mentoring of older to younger. There was a huge emphasis on arts:  drama, writing, drawing, etc. Appropriate, since the school’s founder was a HSU art professor.
Here’s what’s strange, now, all these years later. I’m a bit old to be part of the typical facebook demographic. As would those who are in my generation, which is to say, my Centering School peers. But lo and behold, it seems as if vast numbers of Centering School alums are facebookers, and everyone’s friending everyone else like mad. Perhaps something about the original environment drawing and encouraging creative types leads, all these years later, to a high rate of internet adoption and comfort? All I know is that there are more people from 5th and 6th grade Centering School in facebook than there are from my college years… at least that I’ve seen. That’s a strange statistical improbability.
Regardless, it’s very cool to be meeting up with people, online, who I haven’t seen since 1977, the year I finished 6th grade…  if rather disorienting. It was such a great community! I have sometimes said that I was subjected to two horrible traumas during my childhood: my parents’ divorce, and my departure from Centering School at the end of 6th grade – and I’m not really joking when I say that of the two, the latter was worse.