Homespun. By Jim Langham. Walls come tumbling down in ‘self-interview’ I’ve often wondered what it would be like sometime to interview myself, to project myself to another who would search my heart and soul for insights and comments.
Late last week, I came across a situation where such a thing made sense. As I stood and looked into the shell of my elementary school (Geneva School) as the walls literally came tumbling down, I found a few tumbling down within myself.
“I had known for months that the the old school was going to come down. I had covered school board meetings and had thought I had myself prepared for the moment that one of the few remaining monuments to my childhood would come tumbling to the ground,” said Jim Langham, recently, who had attended Geneva school for the first nine years of his life.
“However, as I stood on sacred ground that had once been my playground, and looked through the shambled walls of what had been the north side of the gym, something sank deep within my soul, an emotion that wanted to cry, put the wall back up, and take one more trip to those days all at the same time,” Langham continued.
Langham looked at the bare stage with bricks falling on its platforms even as he spoke, and he recalled the nights he had worn his black and red Geneva Cardinal jersey, white bucks, and had sat on bleachers on the stage playing, “On Geneva,” with his cornet in the school pep band.
To the right, an elongated building which had protruded to the north from the west side of the school had been his ag shop, where he had spent times talking to one of his mentors, Bill Kipfer, who had also sponsored Youth for Christ.
Windows had caved in to what had been the new edition to the east that had contained the band room where he had practiced for marching band. In its basement, he had taken shop with Harry Anderson.
“I can remember when that ‘new edition’ was put on the school,” said Langham. “Before it was there, it was all playground, and we would run to the fence and watch Dr. Campbell load and unload animals to his veterinary hospital.
“It was on that playground where I stole my first kiss,” he said, blushing and refusing to name the recipient. “We used to play dodge ball, softball, basketball and ‘Red Rover, Red Rover’ on this very playground.
“It was along the north end of the playground where we unload and board our school buses,” added Langham. “Sometimes we would run down to Parr’s Grocery and purchase candy or a butterscotch ice cream bar before we got on the bus.”
Langham admitted that more than destruction of the building was the wonder of the mystical passing of time between those days and the coming down of the building.
“Where have 50 years gone since this world was all reality,” he said. “How could it have passed so quickly?”
More than the passage of time, Langham noted that his heart was touched by the reminder of the passage of people. Many of the teachers he had during his time there were now gone. Many of the students had passed on. They had and were experiencing lives totally different than his, lives many would have never thought of during the happy-go-lucky days on the playground and in the gym.
“I remember when my best lifelong friend, Meredith Sprunger, first read that the tearing down of this school would be a possibility,” recalled Langham. “We drove down here while they were cleaning the school in the summer and walked into the gym for what proved to be our last time there together.
“We reminisced about his many times up and down that floor as a Geneva Cardinal, and common educators we had enjoyed such as Harold Long, Bill Morris, Edith Walter, Ruth Brown and Ruth Neuenschwander. We were both saddened with the knowledge that the school was going to come down, Langham said.
“Little did we realize at the time that he would pass before the building did. The loneliness of standing by the school and watching it come down, as I stood there alone, minus him, members of my family that had attended there, and other close friends, was piercing for the solitary moment that I watched more of the walls fall,” continued Langham.
Back to reality, I’ll never forget the time that my parents visited us at our home in Michigan after returning from a trip to Grand Rapids. There, my dad once again visited the old shell of a building where he had attended early high school while staying with relatives, where one of his greatest memories was actually watching Gerald Ford play football.
“There it was, the old shell of the school, filled with memories, the building where I had once attended school,” he said to me during that visit. “And there I was, an old man, wondering where life had gone since those days. I never thought I would get old so quick.”
It was those words that filled my mind as I stood and watched the walls come tumbling down at my old school last week.
“Well now I’m him and the same feelings are happening as the walls inside of my heart tumble at this sacred moment,” I said to myself as I stood there and contemplated my self-interview of emotion.
There I stood, 50 years later, with gray hair and arthritis, wondering where it had gone.
And like my father before me, I found myself saying, “I never thought it would pass so quick.”