Elves, perhaps?

            Space Food Sticks were now available to the general public. This was around the time that I became fully involved in life. And, like Space Food Sticks and Solid State Electronics, everything in life was becoming smaller. Concentrated. Condensed.

            Like Space Food Sticks, for me, Kindergarten would also be available soon. I had tried to go there well before I was enrolled. My dad found me seven blocks away to the north on the hottest day of the summer, which is, perhaps, the worst day to try to jumpstart kindergarten. I’d been working at a huge right angle to the school in trying to find it.

            Now, I was really going. I was young, handsome, full of Froot Loops, and I was really going to kindergarten!

            I was let off quite a distance away from the school, but that was as far as the car could go, you see. The car couldn’t go onto that huge lawn. It was like walking with all of the ensemble down the yellow brick road toward the Emerald City, but this time, the sidewalk was grey and I was alone. The sidewalk to the school stretched on and on, and the school itself was huge! It was like a castle. I walked up the wide sidewalk toward the school. I walked and walked.

            I walked and walked and walked toward that school on its huge grounds. I don’t remember much of kindergarten, but I remember the smocks that we were required to wear during finger-painting. They had you wear old shirts! You could get paint on them, you see. You could see where they had tried to wash it out, but there was still some pigment left. And, that was ok. We were also told not to eat the glue paste because it had rat hair in it. And I bought it! That was the clincher for me- the rat hair. Rat hair, I could understand, but summing that up as a reason not to eat glue paste was like telling someone not to hit themselves on the head with a hammer for cosmetic reasons. I bought it, though. I don’t remember much more of my kindergarten year. There wasn’t much in the way of academics. I remember a lot of first grade. But, what I remember most is, back then, that school was huge!

           

            What happened?

            Sometime around first grade, on my way home from school, I was standing at a crosswalk on a rainy, windy day. A gust of wind came along, and my umbrella lifted me into the air. I won’t exaggerate, I wasn’t lifted a foot, but I was certainly lifted inches into the air.

            It felt great. I tried later to get the umbrella to repeat that performance, but it wouldn’t work anymore. I had gotten bigger. Was the school shrinking accordingly, even then?

           

            How do they do that?

            I recently met a woman who had gone to school with me back then. I remembered her! Decades before, somehow, I was probably driven, I visited her a mile away from where I lived and sat in her wading pool with her. We were eight. I was in the pool talking to her, she had long, dark blonde, curly hair, and the conversation went like this:

            I told her- “The show’s about a man named Brady, and a lovely lady. With the man, the mother had died. With the woman, the dad had died…”

            The girl with the dark blonde curls was intently hyperventilating. I knew what she was doing. I knew everything, including the Brady Bunch.

            “…so, they met and they each brought a lot of kids!”

            The girl then leaned forward and dunked her head beneath the water.

            “Um…Ah…” I said, realizing that she probably couldn’t hear me underwater.

            She surfaced sometime later, probably with a number in her head, and now I regret not asking what it was. I blithely continued with my description. My father hadn’t nicknamed me ‘Motormouth’ for nothing. She listened, ‘hyperventilating’ again.

            “The father is an architect, and the mother is a housewife. So, the kids aren’t brother and sisters, but kind of…”

            She nodded and hyperventilated and chose the exact worst time, again, to stick her head beneath the water.

            “Um…Ah…”

            There’s a trick you can do, forming a cone of air with your hands and talking beneath the water. I only learned it later, and I obviously didn’t use it then.

            “Um…Ah…”

            She finally surfaced, inhaling with relish. The number she had generated was now probably larger. I still didn’t ask what it was.

            “…So, there’s also the maid and the butcher, but there’s, like, six kids total in the house! And, a sheepdog.”

            She dripped and nodded politely.      

            I didn’t mention how that visit went when I saw her forty years later, though. Nor did I get around to asking her if she knew how the school had shrunk. Never mind asking how many seconds she’d been able to hold her breath that day. These memories don’t come without regrets.

           

            Anyway, they’ve shrunk that school perfectly. I mean, they’ve updated the windows and doors, but, it seems to me, the school is only half the size that it was before. I obviously wasn’t around when they did that.

            How did they pull it off? I mean, physically. When you’re shrinking a school, does the scaffolding you’re using shrink along with it as you’re working? You can’t continue to shrink something, using any method, if it has shrunk so much that it’s below you. I’m no engineer, but that’s something to consider.

            I lived in this city until I was ten, and came back when I was forty, discovering that the school had shrunk, and that I had missed what had to have been contentious city meetings. There must have been opposition. I mean, shrinking the school so. Why? Out of spite? Revenge for bad grades? I wasn’t here to see on the news that they had decided to miniaturize the school, but I imagine that the meeting went something like this:

            “The chair recognizes the Sixth Ward Alderperson.”

            “Thank you. We’re on the verge of signing a contract with Brown Construction to proceed with the miniaturization of Hayes School.”

            Rustling and interruptions, and the alderperson continues…

            “Excuse me…Excuse me… I mean, it’s 1985 for God’s sake.”

            Gasps, which don’t stop the alderperson...

            “The Soviets are outpacing… Sorry, wrong decade…. We need to catch up with the Tiger Economies, miniaturize this school, and do more things with computers! Miniaturization will bring efficiency to our children’s education, and then we can introduce AP Long Division and get a new set of finger-painting smocks.”

            More gasps and dissenting voices. But, do you think that stops the alderperson?...

            “Excuse me… Excuse me…It’s not even your ward… Excuse me!...”

            I think things went a little like that, but, you see, I was in Kansas at the time. That had to have been how they pulled off shrinking the school. I knew everything in kindergarten, and grade school may have knocked some things out of me, but I still know that, whatever gender, whoever proposed the miniaturization of that school had to be gorgeous.

            Of that much I am sure. Whoever they were, they sold their idea, and were gorgeous, and did things like show up at Labor Day celebrations, and meet acquaintances in the mid-scale grocery store in their crisp clothes and have an impromptu chat about stoplights beside the Foster Grant display. I don’t see how they can do that. How can they be so pseudo-knowledgeable and breezy? I can’t do it.

           

            But I must focus on the question at hand.

            I think that maybe the school expands and shrinks depending on who’s looking at it.

            So. There’s an answer, of sorts. It’s only a working theory, yes, but that’s how science progresses. And, that’s as far as I’ve gone.

 

            But, how does that happen, then, and is anyone behind that? With every question answered, there are more generated.

           

            From the north, looking down an access alley, one can see the north wall of the cafeteria which is attached to that tiny school. You know I hate to go on, but the cafeteria used to be huge! Like, three stories. Now it’s only something like thirty feet tall, at most. Later, when I was in third grade and Nixon was firmly ensconced, we had a fire drill that ended with an assembly in that parking lot.  

            This was a talk and demonstration by the fire department. They told us not to play with our parent’s smoking things, and then revealed that one of them, in full firefighting uniform, had somehow gotten onto the roof of the cafeteria. Four of them held a trampoline below him, he crouched into a ball on the edge of the roof, and allowed himself to fall into that little trampoline! I nearly wet myself.    

            They wouldn’t do that now-a-days, I can tell you that. I can just see it…

            “Special Channel Eight Investigative Report: Children In Peril.”

            During a fire-safety demonstration last week, children were taught how to leap off a three-story building, and then a two-hundred pound Dalmatian was dangled over them. Film at ten.”

            I’m sorry. I forgot to mention that part. Yes, the fire department swung a guy in a Dalmatian costume over us for their ‘big finish’. I mean, how do you follow a guy intentionally falling three stories off a perfectly good building? (And, that’s 1970s stories…) Dress a rookie in a dog costume, have him get into the basket on the end of a fire engine ladder, swing him around in a huge, high arc and have him wave down to the gleeful kiddies, one of whom was me. I don’t know the details of how they shrunk the school, but that’s just like them. Whoever they are. That’s their ‘MO’. Bread and Circus. I may not understand the mechanics of it, but that’s how they hid the dastardly act itself. Hold a puppy up with one hand to distract the constituency, and shrink the school with the other.