Have you ever stopped to think about why we do Facebook?  How many mindless hours have I spent scrolling through the endless stream of posts, hitting like, share, or comment?  Here’s a funny political joke–like, share.  Here’s another tear-jerker dog story–like, share, comment, “Hang the b*****d!  Here’s another motivational story–like.  This is truly a zero sum game. The more I like, the more of the same shows up!

Then, of course there are the pictures of everyone’s kids!  What a cute baby–like.  Jeez, what an ugly kid–like.  So you’re going on vacation?  Here’s a picture of your frou-frou drink, complete with paper parasol and that big plate of enchiladas you had for lunch.  I especially like the maps!  I’m at DIA flying to destination X.  A side note here, I never post my travels until I am safely home!  I figure I may as well put a flashing red neon sign on the front porch, saying, “I’m out-of-town; feel free to drop in and rob the house!”  We’ve even created new verb forms.  I can friend you, or in dire cases, I can unfriend you.  So, if I were to unfriend you, would you ever even know it? Ah, the pressure, the pressure!

Recently, I was sitting on the sofa, aimlessly perusing the endless stream of dogs, politics, and what not’s, when OMG (that’s Facebook for Oh My God!), there was a picture of my old elementary school, all boarded up, deserted and forlorn.  There was a somewhat sad notation that the old  “Letot School was torn down to  make room for the Letot Center, which assists young women who have been sexually exploited.  This center is the only one of its kind in the country.”  Red River Historian.
What a jolt!  Four years of my young life, fourth to seventh grades, were spent there.  Now, I don’t think I had thought about Letot since I “graduated” in seventh grade.  We were the Letot Lions, not that we had any sort of sports teams as I recall.  I even remember the first couple lines of our school song,

“We are the boys and girls of Letot School; we always work and play by the Golden Rule.”

How corny is that?  Looking at that boarded up building, I felt a flood of old memories come surging back.  There was the principal’s office.  That window was my fourth grade classroom.  Funny, the front steps used to be bigger.  They must have shrunk over the years.  The locales of our childhood are supposed to remain pristine in a bubble of time, not be ruthlessly torn apart.  What happened to the big live oak trees?

The wall was still there.  How often did we sit on that old wall, discussing life and our futures, as much as one can at age 10 or 11!  To the left of the school stood a restaurant owned by the parents of one of my best friends.  It was pretty upscale for those days, a steak and seafood kind of place.  As soon as you were seated, your waiter would bring a basket of little biscuits with honey butter and wonderful little cinnamon twists.  My family didn’t go there very often, a bit too pricey for us!  After school my friend and I would scale the wall and enter the back entrance of the restaurant where the cooks were baking the day’s supply of cinnamon rolls and little biscuits.  We sat happily in one of the big red leather booths, gorging ourselves on hot cinnamon twists and biscuits dripping in butter.  That was in the good old days before we discovered calories, diets, boys, and maintaining a slim, trim waistline!

And that hallway, it used to be bigger too.  We were ushered into that corridor frequently for tornado and bomb drills.  There we crouched down with our arms protectively encircling our head and neck. Remember–this was the 50’s when the paranoia of the Cold War left everyone on edge. Perhaps those drills might have been helpful in the event of a tornado, but I have my doubts that they would have done much good in the event of the dreaded nuclear bomb attack!  In reality, I am not sure that Letot Elementary School in a semi-rural part of north Dallas was high on the prospective list of targets for those dastardly Soviets.

I remember on one occasion we all traipsed down to the auditorium to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on the only television set in the school, black and white of course.  How romantic– a real queen!  Now that was something that would make any twelve-year old’s heart beat faster.  We sat there on wooden seats (none of those padded seats for our tender little behinds!).  When I see Queen Elizabeth today, a somewhat portly, elderly woman, I recall that young, slender, dark-haired new queen, oh so many years ago.

Behind the school was the playground where we went out for recess once or twice a day to burn off a little of that excess energy.  Everything about recess was politically incorrect in those days.  The merry-go-round was dangerous, and the jungle gym was truly a hazard.  We played cowboys and Indians.  Some days you were the cowboy, and some days you were the Indian.  We frequently played a rather brutal game of King of the Mountain on an old dirt pile.  When we chose up for teams, for games like Red Rover or kickball, sometimes  you got picked first, and other times you were last.  You know what; we survived!  We learned that life isn’t always fair and that you don’t always win or get picked for the team.

On one level we all know that nothing is constant, except in our memories.  Goodbye old Letot, gone but not forgotten!  As one of my favorite novelists said, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”  Thomas Wolfe

©The Eclectic Grandma, 2016