Breaking News Alert

Which is an inelegant way to begin, but that's how I found out:

My high school will be closing down.
At the end of this school year.

Rick forwarded me the stub of the article from the local paper just an hour or so ago. In an email full of worry that I would feel sad.

And I don't. Not really. Or maybe, not yet.

It's just that high schools feel so permanent. Even after you've graduated they do. You know? They are an edifice of adolescent awkwardness and discovery. They feel like they will last forever. Or, at least, they feel like they will outlast you. And it just seems strange to me that the physical site of those self-doubts, bad poems, dreams of the future, and gushing over boys simply won't be there any more.

In a few years' time, maybe, I will drive by the site where I once went to school and it will be a strip mall. Maybe where I studied french there will be instead a nail parlor. Maybe where I reluctantly *ran* laps during P.E. there will be, one day, a Denny's. Or worse: maybe the whole thing will become a Walmart. (It's sweet of you to insist otherwise, but it's already happened to the site of my first restaurant job.)

This is morose and self-indulgent, I realize. Especially so when I admit that I haven't recognized my school for years anyway. It seems they went on a fundraising spree and completely transformed at least the front of the building. So it's been many years already since I could drive by, point inside one of those small rooms and say, "See that? That's where I took my Art History class. And once, when our teacher was on vacation, we watched Pink Floyd's The Wall. And right at the moment in the strip club -- right as the woman is there, clad only in a g-string, shaking everything she's got for the benefit of the camera -- yeah, that's the moment a visiting student and her mom came in. To behold the greatness of a catholic, all-girl education in action."

(Now do you understand why I am morose? These stories are much less funny when you are pointing in the direction of the garden center at Kmart.)

Anyway, there it goes. High school, that is. And I will be able to witness it. Along with what I imagine will be a string of emails invading my inbox, all imploring me to save the school, like it were Ferris Bueller.

I suppose, if I particularly hated high school, this might be a fun day for me. Like a sort of purification ceremony wherein I set the object of my pain and/or abhorrence on fire. But you know what? I didn't hate it. Not in the slightest, actually. So instead I feel like I am losing a landmark. One of bittersweet importance to the making of me.

I feel like New Hampshire after the demise of the old man of the mountain.

From now on, I will be "old man" free. And suddenly feeling much older myself.