STORIES FROM THE STEPS, VOLUME 2, CHRONICLE 23, DEFINITIONS:
      Urban slang & the great guitarist Jimi Hendrix have a differing definition of “gypsy eyes” than me. I’ve increasingly felt that the eyes of that nomadic lifestyle are wise & tough & sad. Sad because they’d seen too much of what brought the intelligence & grit.
        My gypsy eyes weren’t prepared for today. A 76 year old schoolhouse that more people than I imagined had good memories of, is being torn down & its time. The lady at 6579 acquitted herself with honor serving two school communities, but it’s time.
         It wasn’t time for my eyes. My driving routes take me by the old place 2 or 3 times a week & I’ve watched her come apart piece by piece, memory by memory, like an Alzheimer’s patient. What seemed a progressive sweep from the auditorium on one end to the main entrance in the middle to the gym & cafeteria on the other wasn’t so.
         The front door address number stood without its door, Mrs. Pitts & the boys bathroom windows just past the green & white 6579 hung in their places & then came the sight & sound of a demo dozer taking down the other end. I made it in time to see the windows of Mrs. Farrow’s math room under Coach Moser’s art room.
       The room, in the first class Coach Mo ever taught in his three year Trojan stint, where I learned the definition of a vanishing point. The term’s meaning was more anguishing as an art room became life & had almost vanished along with an already vanished staircase, picture window & a classroom underneath that I posted a picture of only days ago.
        I turned around, adjusting my music to the 70s soul I learned to love in those halls, & passed again on my right, the place of so many rites of passage. And my gypsy eyes, more sad than wise in spite of my intent to focus on the positives of what some view as negative, began to leak & I thought of the Dr. Suess quote I posted when the first blows of demo began.
       The one about smiling & not crying because it’s over. As a briny tear delivered its bitter salt to my mouth’s corner, I thought me & the good doctor, at least on this occasion, have differing definitions of over…