SNAP!
by Mel Gilden

The trumpeters are standing on the bridge to the home ec building playing their brassy accompaniment to the raising of the flag.

SNAP!

Mr. Weinstein conducts the advanced orchestra -- which was pretty damned good, as I recall.

SNAP!

It's lunchtime and things are, as usual, crazy. I am a Space Legion coordinator running around with a clipboard, attempting to keep lines of kids between painted yellow lines on the asphalt. For some reason I believe my job is very important.

I remember my years at John Burroughs in snapshots, each presenting a single experience. I have better luck remembering the kids than I do the teachers because I have been with most of these kids since first grade at Hancock Park Elementary.

SNAP!

A line of post-shower naked boys shuffles forward, many of them a little shy about the changes turning them into biological men. Each one steps into a shallow pool of disinfectant when he gets his thin scratchy towel.

SNAP!

The Burr Frolics. I see the whole thing from the orchestra pit in front of the stage. Teachers acting a little goofy. Music. Dancing girls in tights giving my hormone-drenched body a swift kick farther into puberty. 

SNAP!

I sit at a wooden desk so ancient it has a circular hole for an inkwell.

The desk is a palimpsest on which declarations and suggestions are carved, messages from past sufferers.

When we graduated from John Burroughs teachers and grade counselors told us that these were our most important years, that we would never forget them. Different teachers and grade counselors told us the same thing when we graduated from high school. I suppose a case can be made for the importance of those years, but a case can also be made for the fact that we were just a bunch of kids going to school. Either way, the snapshots remain, pressed into the scrapbook of my mind.

See you in the fall! Have a great summer!

Mel Gilden is a freelance writer of screenplays as well as children's and adult fiction. His stories appear frequently in the Los Angeles Times.

 BACK | NEXT