Writings and Reflections

Thou Shalt Not Return

by Lloyd B. Abrams

Lawrence Arnold knew deep down that he shouldn’t go back to visit his old school. He had worked there for many years, and it had been two and a half years since he retired. But he felt compelled to return, to see if anything had changed and, maybe, to see if he had even been missed.

He knew that the outward appearance of a school stayed the same. After all, an edifice is an edifice, and most city schools were remarkable in their sameness. And what would be going on inside within the monolithic system would still be pretty much the same. But without him inside, it could seem completely different. He might indeed feel like an interloper, a stranger in a strange land.

It wasn’t like he didn’t have empirical experience. He had gone to his fortieth high school reunion even though he hadn’t wanted to. But his wife had chided him. “You’ve gotta go, Larry? You’ll regret it if you didn’t.”

Lawrence hated standing around with a tiny glass of diet coke in his hand, acting all friendly-like, in that stodgy golf club meeting room, and hated being amidst his old classmates, now paunchier and grayer, but, in many ways, still very much the same.

The people in their little cliques he didn’t like forty years earlier were the same ones he didn’t want to talk to this time around. The ones who gathered to smoke outside, and were drinking too much at the reunion, were the same assholes, only older. Getting skipped in elementary school and being a year younger than all of them was part of it. Being one of only four Jewish kids out of the 108 graduates didn’t help, either. Worse, the few close friends he had hoped to see never showed up. So this time, like back then, he felt isolated and alone. Lawrence vowed never, ever to attend another reunion, no matter how much he might later regret it.

So despite his history of these sorts of disappointments, Lawrence found himself on the Belt Parkway in their eighteen-year-old Toyota station wagon, instead of his new Odyssey, driving into Brooklyn in auto-pilot mode. The early February day was sunny and unseasonably mild, one of three glorious days after a blizzard had hit the area. The front window of his car had been sprayed and splattered and he was disgusted with the grimy windows. The aged wiper blades were streaking window washing fluid that he knew was running out. But it was after ten in the morning rather than seven thirty and the light traffic was moving right along.

He had chosen a Wednesday to avoid the nightmarish alternate-side parking regulations and he was able to find a parking spot only a block away. He set the crook lock and got out of the car, gingerly stepping over a rainbow-tinted puddle. I’m so damn glad I don’t have to do this every day, he thought, with a sigh of relief.

He approached the front of the hulking two-block-wide building. Bunches of students were hanging around outside. It was only the beginning of the spring term and these kids were already cutting classes, or they had none to attend. They barely made way for him as he walked up the steps.

Lawrence recognized none of the security guards at the main entrance, nor the two assigned police officers who sat beside them. He decided to say very little when he was asked for identification. He didn’t want to sound like a lonely burn-out case. He chose to avoid telling them that he had worked in this building for thirty years – more than half his lifetime. Why the hell would they even care?

He presented his driver’s license and said, “You promise not to laugh?” – something that he often said to put people at ease and to gauge their level of humor and flexibility and all he got was a noncommittal shrug – and then printed and signed his name in the composition notebook and added “Asst Princ Guidance” as his destination. One of the guards wrote his name with a Sharpie on an adhesive ID tag, nodded and half-smiled, and handed it to him.

Groups of raucous students were milling around the doorway to the guidance suite. A burly security guard approached them, rudely quieted them down and ushered them into a line along the wall. Lawrence assumed that the students were probably waiting to request program changes. Besides teaching two math classes a day, his more important role had been programming the school, a teacher-administrator position that had given him a sense of autonomy and esteem, and the opportunity to put to use the computer skills he had learned and honed on the job, as well as the elaborate spreadsheets he had created and refined.

In the sixteen years Lawrence was in charge of scheduling, there were never these noisy lines of agitated students clogging up the main hallway. If nothing else, his contentious dealings with guidance counselors to get things right the first time through – wouldja please, goddamn it? – and his meticulousness in making sure that students had correct programs, with no holes – unassigned periods – in their schedules, was one of his major contributions towards having each school term begin and run more smoothly. He was driven by the assumption that if each kid had the right place to go every period, there would subsequently be a lot less mayhem.

But this noise, this racket! This was something he didn’t miss. When the school was “modernized” some years ago in a multi-year project costing millions of dollars, he always wondered why they couldn’t have had the good sense to install sound-deadening ceiling tiles in the cavernous halls. Just a tiny decision like that could’ve helped the school sound less chaotic, more welcoming, and possibly make the place a lot safer.

There were so many things that were being done wrong. The only things that ever periodically changed were the new and supposedly better artificially-named educational programs along with the consultants with connections who’d escaped their classrooms and who were now shilling for the latest and greatest, all which cost more scarce dollars and were of questionable value, and only served to profit the purveyors and publishers. Not to mention possible kickbacks. Despite all the hype, the gloss, and all the wasted teacher-training time at staff development meetings, the new programs and the new materials and the new techniques rarely benefitted the teachers and their students. These two “cohorts” – in the lingo of the day – always came last.

Oh for chrissakes, he realized with a deep breath. I’m obsessing again and ranting and raving about all this pent-up shit. What did I come here for?

Then: What a fuckin mistake. I’ve gotta get outa here.

And so Lawrence wheeled around, peeled off his name tag, and strode out of his old school building.

And he tried to never look back.

– This story, originally written in 2005, was resurrected from my “Works in Progress” folder

February 6, 2005 .. Rev 15 / May 4, 2020

Up to the beginning of the story

May 4, 2020 … Copyright © 2020, Lloyd B. Abrams
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