It's Elementary, My Dear.

After a laborious day of painting the walls to our newly expanded suite at the lab, I made my way to my old stomping ground at Fleetwood Elementary School where they were having a cook-off and celebration to commemorate an era soon to end.

This aging schoolhouse to where I had spent my salad-years through grade one to seven is slated for demolition.

Past and present students as well as the teachers and parents came to say their hellos and goodbyes. I began my trip down memory lane with the class photos on the hallway walls and tried to find myself amongst the other children looking straight back at me. I had a look of innocence back in nineteen-eighty-eight when I started grade one and only slightly changed my facial expression to a look of non-chalantness and boredom throughout my elementary years. I don’t remember feeling that way about school, however, so I can’t explain why I wasn’t smiling much. Perhaps I was just being Emo (hahaha!).

I recognised the classmates I was with and could still recall a handful of them by name. The first classroom I had entered was actually the last classroom I was in: grade seven with Ms. McKenzie. The layout was pretty much the same as I had remembered, though the desks were arranged in groups of four unlike my days when they were in rows. On the teachers desk was a white bulbous eMac. I don’t recall seeing that when I was in grade seven.

Moving along, I waltzed into another classroom further down the hall to which I remember it being the Mac lab. Though it was void of any resemblance of it now, I recall having a lot of fun with the cloning tool on the old Mac Paint program which were running on a few Mac Plusses. I also remember printing large banners using the noisy ImageWriter dot matrix printers in which the Macs were connected to. The Mac engaged me. Someone should have taken a photo of me here as I would have definitely been grinning. To have this tool at my fingertips excited me so much that I couldn’t pull myself away from it. It’s second nature to most people now, but I remember having to show my fellow classmates that one can lift a mouse from the edges of the mouse pad, re-centre it and put it down, and move the cursor on the screen even farther. I have Apple to thank for my early start in shaping me into the geek I am today.

There was an assembly in the gymnasium packed with people of all ages. I bypassed them and went straight upstairs to Ms. Gidora and Ms. Nelson’s combined classroom where I had spent my grade five and six with them (if my memory serves me right). To my surprise, they were still teaching out of the same classroom and the posters on the walls still hadn’t changed! Though the two of them didn’t recognise me at first, perhaps because they’ve gone through so many faces over the years and not because I didn’t leave a profound impression on them as a child, I embraced them both with a hug and joined in on the chit chat they were having with Ms. Bev Watson and a former classmate bearing gifts from Japan.

I took a stroll around the school grounds and cut right across the outdoor basketball court where children were playing b-ball, looked over to the playground where I had once enjoyed swinging on the swings and climbing on the geodesic jungle gym, and made my way around the corner to the west side of the elementary school where I took several steps back, humbly acknowledged it’s presence, and said my last goodbye.

Fleetwood Elementary School: 1944 - 2009.