CityView Magazine

18 | September/October • 2014 By Bill McFadyen Not as big as it used to be O ne of the skills lost with aging is one's ability to see the largeness of some things in our lives. Reaffir- mation of this deficiency came to me as I returned to Vanstory Elementary School with my precious youngest child, Hudson. Holding hands, we strode in to that foundational place of my early education to familiarize him with where he would be enrolled that August. As we headed through the front door, he looked up at me sort of side-way-ish-ly and opined, "Dad, I bet when I go here, everyone will already know who I am because I look just like you did when you went here." We checked in at the front office as arranged and we donned our guest passes. My first destination was just across the hall to the dual-purpose cafete- ria/auditorium. It was in that hallowed hall that my third grade teacher, Mrs. Clark, tapped me for my first public speak- ing gig. I served as narrator of the school play. I remember the spot- light and the seemingly immeasur- able distance from podium to the far wall. Upon taking that right turn through the double doors with Hudson in tow and facing the en- trance to the cafeteria line, stage on my le, I was struck by the closeness of things, by the lowness of the ceil- ing. Wall to wall distance now seemed about the length of my average first putt aer tortured arrival on a green. I had the sense of someone having stolen a portion of the square footage. So I readjusted by doing a 180 and headed down the hall behind us. e library that should have been on my right was gone, replaced by administrative offices. We discovered it later where my fourth grade classroom had been. e ta- bles and bookshelves seemed to have shrunk considerably. I found myself wondering the fate of that book on Babe Ruth… the one where Babe worked in the laundry room of his board- ing school and was disallowed from playing baseball one day until he had ironed out all the wrinkles he had created when hurrying through the task. Did they keep the one of the boy stranded in the woods in Maine, who eventually harvested a moose in a day long chase of hunter and hunted? More poeti- cally, would either end up in the little hand that presently was McFadyen's musings so tenderly holding mine? Ahead of us, I pointed to the door of my first grade class- room. I knew when I walked in that there would be a coat closet on the le. It was the one in which now-deceased swell pal Will Broadwell hid one time aer lunch, pulling all the coats on top of himself in a one-man game of hide-and-go- seek. Mrs. Gierke, tipped off by our poorly disguised giggles, surmised in no time that Will was not in his place. She found him on the first try, but she seemed not nearly as amused as were the rest of us. Again, though, as I led Hudson into the room, I was nearly oppressed by the modesty of the room size. e counter tops were so low. e chalk board seemed a min- iature of the one I remembered. To make matters worse, there was no record player anywhere to be found. I did my best to inspire my son with the grandeur of things. Admittedly, it was a struggle for me. In contrast, he seemed at least open-eyed, perhaps even wide-eyed. We moved outside to the grounds where the vastness of my childhood frolics would surely bring back to me a sense of limitlessness. We opened the doors and there was the wa- ter fountain into whose faucet the mean boys used to stuff caterpillars during bag-worm season. I showed Hudson the very spot where my cal- ico cat, Dynamite, spent the day un- der the building the time she followed me to school from my house on Mirror Lake Drive. From there, we headed out to the great expanse where balls were dodged and ropes were jumped and races were run; to the place where Tony Cowans asked Sarah Leitenger if she would be my girl friend, delivering the news to me in the affirmative once we reassembled in Mrs. Buie's class. (It occurs to me now that Sarah and I never actually broke up before she moved away that summer; somewhere, she is still out there, possibly still considering me her boyfriend.) Again, though, I was in an undeniable state of deflation. ere was no stadium-sized ball field. e black top was compressed from that of my memo- ry, and not particularly black for that matter. Even the great out-of-doors now closed in around me. Hudson, meanwhile, seemed less inclined to hold hands and more inclined to chase fairies that I for the life of me could not see. We headed back toward the main office, Hudson now do-

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