Watcher In The Woods

So they're tearing out huge chunks of the building I'm working in right now so they can do some remodeling. I was looking for a room today and wandered into one of the decimated parts. There were chairs and tables and desks stacked everywhere. It looked like a hole punch exploded over large portions of the floor. Office supplies were thrown here and there, abandoned. Huge strips of carpet were ripped out. It was like a bulldozer came through and started to demolish the place, but went on a permanent smoke break before it got done.

I went over in this corner of the room and sat down on one of the chairs. I was staring out the window at this catwalk and the tiny construction workers on the ground, and it was suddenly 1987. Early June. We had this whole thing at the end of school years at my elementary school. We'd carry our tiny chairs down to the cafeteria and stack them neatly in piles. The piles would get bigger and bigger and the kids would keep on coming. We'd have to clean out our desks, bring home our projects, try to fit all the loveless assignments and abandoned bits of things into our pockets and backpacks and plastic grocery bags. We washed the desks and stacked them.

Then we'd head down to the cafeteria. And for three years running, we sat and watched "Watcher In The Woods" (Yes, Bette Davis. They're awful hip, those Butte Bandits.) projected against a wall of the gym.

It was the same feeling. Abandonment. Loss. Everything being torn apart and put away. Stacked up. Discarded. At least at school, I knew that people would come back the next year and unstack it all. It would be of use again. The emptiness of the back rooms at my building was more pervasive. No one is coming back for those desks. No one will ever sit in those chairs. Their usefulness is at an end. They're destined for the great circular file in the sky.

One of my biggest problems is that I've always had trouble letting things go. I don't like to see emptiness. I don't like to see usefulness come to an end. Especially in the form of vast spaces of my childhood. Or my adulthood, for that matter.

Good night, desks. Good night, chairs. Good night, moon.