African Dawn, detail. Scratchboard, original 12 x 9 in. Copyright 2007, Tania Nault.
Have you ever opened a time capsule? You know, those little sealed deals that you put a variety of historically significant mementos intended to be opened at some point in the future? Well, this evening I got to walk through one.
My daughter will be in grade nine this September, and I’m not sure what it’s like were you’re from, but here part of grade eight is spent exploring the various high schools in our city. Now, for my daughter this has been something of a pointless exercise because she’s been signed up to go to Luther College High School practically since she was a zygote. My former spouse and I may not have always seen eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but this is one thing on which we both agree: our kids are going to our high school alma mater (go Lions!). I was a “dormie” (I boarded at the school) and he was a day student (his family was from the city). I kept in fairly close touch with the school for several years after I graduated – I even helped organise the 10-year reunion – but when my ex and I divorced, somehow I fell out of touch with the school. I think it’s been almost seven years since I’ve been inside. But tonight the school hosted an information night for new students.
Now, it was really no big deal for Katie, she went to one of these in the fall with her dad, but she wanted to go again and I was happy to take her. I drove up to the school, parked on the street and walked in through the “guest” entrance to the gym. At this point I was still fine because so far, nothing I’ve done is anything like my experiences of twenty years ago (dormies couldn’t have cars at the school and we always entered the gym through the interior school entrance). But as I sat on the wooden bleachers and looked around the gym, banners hanging from the ceiling for the Luther Invitational Tournament (go Lions!) next week, something happened to me. There across the gleaming wooden floor sat Clint Uhrich, my grade 11 English teacher, and next to him, Angela Tillier, the girls gym teacher (now director of athletics), and behind the podium stood Mark Anderson, now the Principal, and finally, Pastor Larry Fry, who’d just started at the school when I was in grade 12, now the school chaplain. I sat and listened to the presentations, but I’m not sure I could tell you what anyone said, because as they talked I became certain that at any moment I’d look to my left and right and instead of my daughter and a room full of other hopefuls there would be all my old friends and there’d be Pastor Christiansen at the podium leading us all in daily chapel.
After the presentations we were taken on a tour of the school and as we filed out of the gym (walk around the edges, not across the floor!) and down the narrow hallway, up the stairs and past the administrative offices, the teachers’ lounge, the counselling offices and into the classroom halls the feeling simply increased. Somehow I’d been transported back in time. Everything was almost exactly how I’d remembered it. I’m sure the other parents in my group thought I was some kind of nut, “Oh, my god, there’s Yorick!” (the skeleton in the glass closet right outside Randy Brooks’s biology lab) and as we turned down the hall towards the girls’ dorms and into the Blue Room I was floored, it looked exactly as I remembered it. I wanted so badly to open the doors separating the rest of the school from the girl’s dormitory and go find my old room that I thought I might cry.
Yes, there were some differences. The year we graduated they started construction on a new wing that now contains the new art room (the old one, where I practically lived in grade 12, is now a film studio), a new library and computer lab. And the dorm lounge has been made bigger – the original was basically a room with a tv in it. But everything felt the same.
The tours ended and we met down in the cafeteria. I had a chance to talk to Mr Uhrich, who shook his head and said to me, “You know, you could go sit in a desk right now and we could start English class.” I could have kissed him. They say you can “never go home again” and maybe that’s true, but man, oh man, I came awful close tonight.
