:: anne in the attic ::

Create Your Own Countdown

:: Saturday, December 04, 2004 ::

Sometimes events coincide with music discoveries in such a serendipitous way. Not that the events themselves could be considered good, but they are woven haplessly into the audio-visual tapestry of my memory in motion. The movies I create in my head are often set to music. The frames jump and skip and are sometimes out of focus; there is nothing to be done about it, the ravages of time on my faulty recall. I can't see it so clearly anymore, though I am trying. I am trying to catalog the things that will be lost -- nuances of a time, mostly, a child's biased and narrow memory.

Recently a school newsletter informed us of a change to the grounds that levelled a place I used to go for hours and lose myself in music. The drawing room in Ellen Browning Scripps Hall was converted into a student study center. It was where the boarders gathered three evenings a week while we waited for the double doors to open into the cafeteria which, for those Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, was converted to a sit-down dinner, a series of round-table assigned seats with our resident faculty each heading a table. There we learned the rituals of formal dining under dimmed lighting and had the chance to know our teachers and our peers in one of the mandatory venues of adulthood social graces. While we waited in the drawing room, the buzz of conversation was often lightly accompanied by one or both of the grand pianos, as many of us preferred the drawing room to the practice rooms and would conveniently practice right before dinner. In the time after afternoon sports and before dinners, I often found myself alone there. After dinner, after evening study hall, weekends, I spent much of my free time there. I loved being alone with the volume, the acoustics, the space. It was elegant, several floor plants thriving in the California weather, large Asian rugs spanning the spaces between couches and chairs, the picture window looking out onto Rohr Terrace. These things I remember so well, I could draw the room-- it's doors, the halls around it, Diedre Breidis' quarters somewhat removed yet near enough to hear concert hall echoes of the piano notes through the halls. k.d. lang's cover of "Helpless" plays over the demolition of this beautiful place. I would have wished to walk through it once more now, but it's not to be. It's gone, made ugly and antiseptic, like many of the liveable spaces were as the old boarding school was converted into a day school years ago.

Now the rooms are empty at night, devoid of the laughter and antics of the healthy, tan California girls who walked the halls, roamed the grounds after hours, snuck out to Jack-in-the-Box at midnight, or down to the beach, a mere three-block stroll from Prospect. Abandoned now. The architecture of Irving Gill still has an easy familiarity for me, as it became my home away from home... which, at the time, seemed more constant than anything else. It was where I grew up "as few people I've seen do as well," said a favorite teacher of mine once.

She is in Portland now, teaching high school science classes at an alternative school only two blocks from my brother's new apartment. I have walked his dog on the school grounds, which doubles as an off-leash dog park after hours; I have probably trod on the same soil as she. Funny. When she taught me, it was music. And I adored her. So I am torn. Maybe I would just like to remember things as they were, not disturb the goodness therein.

I am off work for a week now, my last vacation of 2004. It's booked fairly solidly, a tight balance between work and play. Already I am looking toward the one after.... is this how it goes, as life becomes so much more complicated, always looking ahead and missing the present? Feels like I'm always fighting that impulse lately.

:: Anne 9:40 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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