Friday, June 12, 2015

There is a certain way the school smells sometimes in June.  (Not the sweaty kids smell, or rotting garbage, or bus exhaust, although those are not unfamiliar in June.) It’s something unique, not unpleasant, but hard to place…  It’s a summertime morning smell, perhaps the pores of the 100-year-old wood opening up underneath the varnish from the heat and humidity. Not a bad smell. Not musty exactly, but kind of an old-fashioned smell.

I wonder if I’ll miss that smell, and all the quirks and peccadilloes of PS89 and the life I’ve led in Queens. The school’s summer smell is one that I will forever associate with the patchwork tapestry of images and sounds that make up my memories of school… blue-uniformed kids with red ties and big backpacks being dropped off in the morning, some nestled in the handlebars of daddy’s bike, some on foot pulling along little brothers and sisters and cousins by the hand, some tumbling out of the yellow school bus, sleep-eyed as they are herded into their two straight lines. Parents paused right before their kids walk through the arrival doors to give kisses or blessings and the sign of the cross, or instructions in English or Spanish or Chinese or Bengali to be a good girl or boy, listen to the teacher, work hard.  Then the kids turn and enter the maw of the looming giant.

Will I miss the familiar imposing red brick walls that have surrounded my working life for the past 8 years, 4 stories tall and 2 deep? The tall windows reach towards high ceilings in rooms that were built before it seemed necessary to have more than 2 electrical outlets.  The school smell will always remind me of the rooms that sizzle with the untamable blast of dry steam heat from ancient radiators in winter; that transform from dry deserts into tropical saunas in late May and June.  (There is a a brief respite of comfortable climate in the spring, brought about by the long metal poles that push the windows open at the top.)

My life has been lined with shiny linoleum squares in the hallways, where the kids like to play “don’t step on the red ones,” despite the teachers’ supplications to please just walk like regular human beings. 

I know the details of the school in the intimate way that comes from spending the better part of a decade of your weekday working hours there. I know it the way you come to know a lover’s freckles and ticklish spots and gray hairs…I know the perpetually crooked window shades, the light switches put in by people who seemed to think all teachers would be a minimum of 6 feet tall. 

I know how many water bugs are likely to come crawling out when you first open the big closet down in the cafeteria. (Between 1 and 5)

I know which windows the pigeons like to come in, and in which classroom they one time built a nest (211). 

I know the incessant, repeated, saccharine chime of the ice cream truck floating in on warmer afternoons.  

I know the homemade vendor carts, transformed from grocery carts, selling churros in winter, ices in summer, and a range of healthful donuts and chips and candies in between. 

I came to know, (and feel a certain type of distant affection for) the trannies congregating at the Roosevelt Avenue Dunkin Donuts early in the morning as they concluded their nocturnal activities, unapologetically boasting fishnet stockings, sky-high heels, and sassy attitudes. 

I was privy to the way that daylight would break upon the changing of the guard, as the teachers poured in from Long Island and Manhattan and other parts of Queens.We would arrive for our “shift” in Jackson Heights and the ladies of the night, our foils on the graveyard shift, would depart, scattering to unnamed corners of the neighborhood.  

I was a member of an exclusive set of people, those who wake up before dawn. I rode the subway next to construction workers, nurses, and those with no homes to go to or leave from. We’d ride in sleepy camaraderie, clutching our coffees and glaring at those who occasionally broke the unwritten code of silence governing the use public transportation before 7am.

I came to expect the way the sun would shine directly in your eyes coming down Gleane street at certain times of the year, blinding you for the last block as you trudged towards school. I became adept at avoiding frozen dog poop on the sidewalk in winter, or uneven pavement that would catch you off guard. I watched the slow crumble and decay of the abandoned house in the middle of the block.

The little bits of my morning routine will not be the same this year. Erin’s white car will not pull up outside my building on bad weather days. We won’t hold our breath and say a prayer while merging onto the BQE, watching for potholes and imprudent drivers. I won’t hear her daily Dunkin Donuts coffee order: medium Hazelnut, skim milk, two Splenda. Those routines seemed immovable and permanent at the time. But like all things in life, they are not.

My daily sights won’t be the same, nor will the daily sounds. I’ll be exchanging the thick Queens accents of the school aides for Ecuadorian ones. Part of me is going to miss those

big open vowels.  (Open the do-ah! What’s that on the floo-ah? And my personal favorite, the Queens pronunciation of the Hispanic name Jorge: Hoe-ah-hay)

I’ll be far away from the people and places and things I’ve known for the entirety of my adult life. Yet I’m looking forward to piecing together a new collage, finding the quirks, collecting bits and pieces of daily life across the world, of knowing a new city, discovering a new school, finding a new routine.