Caveat: Edgemere

I had a rather strange flashback memory today.

Strange because of what triggered it. Strange because I don’t think about it much, but when I do, the memories strike me has having been quite important.

The trigger was odd. I was walking to work, on a muggy, sunny afternoon. I saw a boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, walking the other way. He reached the corner where there was a traffic signal, and waited to cross the street. It was quite obvious the boy was having a problem – he needed to pee. He was hopping. He was pacing. He was clutching his pants. Everyone has had that feeling at some point or another. I hope he made it home.

But this business of walking home from school at such an age in the big city, alone, and desperately annoyed and embarrassed because of the need to go to the bathroom brought back a my own memories.

My fourth grade year was rather traumatic, for several reasons. First, my parents forgot (forgot!) my 9th birthday. We were traveling through Colorado, visiting relatives. We had a late birthday party at my Aunt Frances’ house, but I remained convinced that the party occurred only because I wasn’t sufficiently stoic to have resisted the urge to complain about it having been forgotten. And by the end of that month – September, 1974 – something very terrible had happened, the causes of which I don’t even now really understand. Rather than returning home to the small town in California that had always been my home, my mother, sister and I ended up in Oklahoma City, at my grandparents’ house, and I started 4th grade not at a typical low-slung, semi-rural California hippie school but instead at a big-city, multi-storey brick structure called Edgemere Elementary School. It was the most profound culture shock imaginable.

I remember standing on the asphalted school playground, behind the building, and being infatuated by some brash, loud, confident African-American girl with too-long legs, that held court by the basketball hoops there – we didn’t really have African-Americans in Humboldt, and she seemed like a goddess descended from fiction. I remember walking across Edgemere Park from the school to my grandparents’ house for lunch, because the school lunch was unacceptable somehow, or there was some problem – perhaps I’d simply complained, too socially traumatized to stand for the school cafeteria. And I remember one time on that walk across the park, in the cruel, unfamiliar sun of the great plains, when I was like that little boy I saw today – with an almost unbearable impending bathroom disaster, and returning home to my grandmother’s incomprehension, in tears. Childhood is made up of so many small, sequential traumas.

By the end of that school year, we’d returned to California, and I’d finished my 4th grade year at familiar if rather unpleasant Sunnybrae, in Arcata. And my parents were getting divorced. So bigger traumas, too. But the name Edgemere is etched on my brain as a sort of symbol of the bigger world, my first immersion encounter with the wider world beyond the Redwood Curtain where my parents had kept me so safely sheltered. It was the first bursting of the bubble of childhood, maybe, and the creeping awareness that the world included strangers and dangers and exotica.

I can visualize the school vividly if I think about it. And lo and behold, I found the exact remembered view of the school, still there and materially unchanged, using Google street view. Here’s a screenshot – Edgemere Elementary, Oklahoma City, OK.

Weird, indeed.

Work was horrible today – except for the students. I love my students. They put me in a better mood by the end of the day.

I haven’t been doing the jogging thing – I hurt my foot somehow, 2 weeks ago, and haven’t had the nerve to go jogging on it, as it seems to turn in a lame kind of limp after about 5 minutes. I’m trying  to walk more to make up for it, but I’m not doing very well with that.

It’s raining. I like that.

[Daily log: walking, 4 km]