The other day, I went to the Post Office, the one in the building where we worked in the days when our school was being built, and we needed a temporary office. I got off the elevator and was surprised by a feeling; that because something important in my life had happened in that building, I hoped it would stay just like this forever.
I took stock of my surroundings. The floor of the elevator was the same green tile it has always been. The buttons for each story were metal, rectangular, six inches wide and available to riders on each side of the car, a mark in my mind of sure elegance.
One exits the elevator to face a fourteen foot rounded wooden bench that makes a graceful arc, fashioned of koa. Behind the bench are artificial palms that look real and classy. To the left is the mail drop for the earliest pick-up in the area—9 a.m.—and brass-colored drinking fountains. The adjacent restrooms require keys to open—for the men, too—a notice that not just everyone is welcome to use them. Once, our office had merited keys!
The tile-floored lobby has a high ceiling and four heavy glass and metal doors on each side. Everything about that lobby is substantial, tasteful, a reflection of power and money.
Visitors to our office, if they parked in the building, came through those hallmarks of class and confidence. That introduction to Island Pacific Academy could not have hurt us as a school yet-to-be-built.
People of a Certain Age, have you ever visited your old neighborhoods? Have you had the sensation that the house, the yard, the street where you lived are, now that you have years of perspective, smaller than you had remembered? Have you, nonetheless, recalled playmates or features of your house fondly, with particular items sparking specific memories?
I have. And I appreciate the nostalgia these visits spark. It is like touching yourself at a stage in your life you have already transcended.
The feeling, in this case, was different. Nothing looked smaller. There was something proprietary about my feeling, like I owned some piece of what I was seeing. The elevator and lobby have remained the same since the first day I saw it in 2002. The familiarity of the space buoys my spirit.
To get to our office, one exited toward the bank and turned right. We were the corner complex, with desks for three people aligned in an L shape around a conference room where Judy and I met every family interested in the school.
The U.S. Army recruiter is there now. They had been our neighbors. Moving to our spot has given them curb exposure on a busy street. I’ve never been back inside the office since the day we gave up the space. I have no particular feeling about it, at least not like the way I felt today about the lobby.
Of course, it was in the office that all the work of putting together the school was accomplished. Larry worked with the potential funders, contractors, architects and such in the conference room. Judy collected information about prospective families, tested kids, conducted interviews, and worked with me to develop some policies. I set up a payroll system and benefits package, met teacher candidates, and sketched out programs.
No work ever happened in the lobby or the elevator. So why the feeling?
Those years in the building were the only ones I spent as an adult in an office building other than one of a school or university campus. Big deal. Once at one’s desk, one office can be pretty much like any other.
Perhaps the scale of what we were doing affected my thinking about the building. After all, we were planning and constructing over 80,000 square feet distributed over five stories in two edifices serving students in grades JK through 12 and the employment of more than 100 people.
Or maybe getting out of that elevator and walking through the lobby, which I do any time I go to the Post Office, reminds me that the planning actually produced a viable school now 13 years old serving over 500 students every year. It is always good to be reminded of one’s successes.
A building gives the illusion of permanence. So my odd feeling is, in fact, tied to an illusion. The building will not last forever. A new owner might move the bench, retile the green floor, decorate the lobby differently. A building is NOT that something “to stay on and be staid,” such as the star Robert Frost invites us to find in his poem “Take Something Like a Star.”
As long as it remains the same, and as long as I go through it to the Post Office, I expect I will have a memory of that strange feeling of today, that something important in my life happened in that building. And it will be a happy memory.
Daniel E. White
June 14, 2016