SPACE AND TIME

I had the opportunity this past week to travel across time, to walk the paths of my youth, and touch base with moments long forgotten.

Now, if anyone happened to be watching this time travelling feat of mine they would be confused with my description.  To the casual observer it would have looked very much like a woman who had left her car at a service station for an oil change and walked downtown to take care of some business while the work was being done.  And, truth to tell, this is exactly what it was until I decided to take a short cut across the school yard.

Magic happened when I stepped through the caragana hedge at the northeast corner and started down towards the running track that didn't used to be there where I went to school.  Except for a few ball diamonds and the sand pits used for field day events like the running broad jump, the hop, skip, and jump, the high jump, and the pole vault there was nothing but open space between the east end of the school and the west end of the hospital.  Rhodes Street didn't go straight through like it does today and the hospital was much a much smaller building than the condos that now stand in its place.  One of the sand pits remained and I walked along side it remembering all my failed attempts at trying to get my 'hop', 'skip', and 'jump' in the right order.  I was a dismal athlete.  It is quite possible that it was at this very location I came to understand the word 'klutz', and how it applied to me.

There is a real dip in elevation as you head to Broadway from there.  There have been many a storm in recent years that show that this is the lowest point in town - the whole track area turns into a gigantic wading pond for a day or two.  I don't remember that ever happening when I was in school, but I was a farm kid; we missed a lot of what went on in town , especially during summer holidays.

When I reached the other side of the track I had to stop and get my bearings.  The whole property is wide open now but back in the '60s the landscape was different.  As a center piece to the whole town there stood the two story red brick school - two classrooms to each floor, cloakrooms to the front of each.  There was a main hall on both floors, a staircase up either side, and a teacher's office at the back where the health nurse came to give needles.  At the ground floor entrance there was a divide - straight ahead took you into the school, access to the boy's basement was to the right, the girl's to the left.

Just to the west of this huge building stood the little flat-roofed green school and to the northeast was the little one room school where grade one was taught for years.  Where the student parking lot is today was a big slough; I would have forgotten this except those trees are the backdrop for the class photos taken in 1961.  There is not even a hint of any of these landmarks ever existed anymore.

I stopped in my journey through time for a moment.  The caragana hedge along the east boundary hadn't been there so many years ago but there had been one between the school and the ball diamonds.  It took me a minute or two to figure out that that it had started at the end of Carlton Street and ended even with the brick school.  It was a place where we sat in the shade at noon hour and daydreamed about where life would take us.

How many games of marbles and/or jacks were played in this yard?  And the recesses when all the little girls practiced skipping rope - either on our own, or with the long ropes where we tried to synchronize our jump rope talents with rhyming verses, eventually graduating to the intricate patterns of Chinese skipping done with elastic loops scavenged from our mother's sewing supplies.  I smiled at the memory - did the Chinese really have anything to do with that game, I wondered?

It was time to move on - I had things to do.  There used to be a cinder/gravel pathway to the street but there is no sign of it now.  The only hint of where it would be is the two tall pines on the north side of Dr. Arthur Avenue.  I walked this path's imaginary course and stood between those trees for a moment.  The clarity of my memories were so real it was as if I was I was looking at a photograph, and I could almost hear my friends laughing and talking as they did tricks like skin-the-cat from the lower branches while I stood off to the side wondering how they did it.  I really did suck as an athlete.  Still do - like I said, scarred for life.

It was time to step back into 2017 so I crossed the street and continued on my way.  It's funny how taking a 'short cut' had added so much time appreciation to my day.