The Velveteen Building

We come to town in the fall, refugees from a moldy house. I have never wanted to live in Milton Freewater, but the mold has broken me. I no longer seek my dream home, just a good roof and sound pipes. Milton Freewater is what we can afford. I spend one day looking at houses. At the end of the day I make an offer. The house isn’t perfect, but it is good enough. And dry. Very, very dry.

The transition has a few bumps. Escrow is long. We stay in a motel for a while. Then we stay with my mother. I feel lost between two worlds. I try to get a post office box in Milton Freewater so I can give an address to my clients. Since I do not yet officially live in our new house the post office makes me get a note from my mother before they’ll give me one. I feel obscurely shamed. Am I not responsible enough to rent a box without a cosigner? I ask where I should register Alex for school. No one knows. “Call the bus driver,” someone suggests. “He’ll know. He knows all about that.” In Milton Freewater, the bus driver has a lot of pull, I think. I track him down at the district office. And so it is that tired, confused, angry, sick, and beaten, we finally find our way to Freewater Elementary School. We get up early on Alex’s first day at Freewater Elementary. Mrs. Ambler meets us at the office and trots us down a long, dark tunnel of a hallway. Peppy, I think. That’s the word for her. Peppy. I wonder if I can like a peppy person. Pipes run along the ceiling. Student art lines the walls. The floor is dark green tile, exactly like the bathroom tile in the school where I started first grade.

Mrs. Ambler pushes open a door at the end of the hall and we step out into one of those odd spaces that result when buildings grow like Topsy. Eaves jut. Posts occur at random. Cyclone fencing covers a window on the left. Gangs, I think. My heart sinks. “This way,” says peppy Mrs. Ambler. I jump and turn—and find myself facing blue double doors set deep into an old red brick building. It’s a real school, I think. I didn’t know such things still existed.

Mrs. Ambler pulls open the door and for the first time we step into Freewater Elementary School’s oldest building. High ceilings are nearly lost  in  the  distance. Blue staircases zigzag up into deep shadows on both sides of the wide central staircase. Children shout on the playground outside.

“The bathrooms are here,” says Mrs. Ambler as she double-times across the open central area. I sneak a quick look as I trot after her. They’re real school bathrooms, I think.

“Just over here,” says Mrs. Ambler. “This is your new room, Alex.” She holds the door open. Alex sidles past her. Art covers the walls. A squashy sofa slumps in one corner. Two elderly IBMs sit on tables behind it. Big windows flood the classroom with autumn sunshine. Students play tether ball and hopscotch on the paved schoolyard. A kickball game rages on the field beyond.

Mrs. Ambler shows Alex to his new desk, and then through a doorway just to the right of the door we came in. “This is where you’ll store your coat and backpack,” she says.

“What backpack?” I wonder. Alex’s is in a landfill somewhere in Portland, probably incubating mold. I stick my head around the corner. Brass coat hooks mounted on blue boards line the walls. Alex’s school has a real cloakroom. I feel like I have come home.

Real doors, real bathrooms, real cloakroom. Somehow, in all the pain and loss and craziness our lives have become, we have been given a real school. All through that day as I search for a coffee shop with Internet access, discover Espresso in Motion, and work out a deal with the owner so I can use a table as a temporary office, that thought keeps me going. Reality is a funny thing. Alex’s school in Portland was new the year he started kindergarten. Construction materials lurked in corners. Painter’s tape still framed some of the doorways. At the time it seemed bright, fresh, and hygienic. I volunteered regularly. The staff and I were on good terms. And yet, we remained human shadow puppets to each other, cordial strangers who shared Alex’s days.

In spite of the beautiful school, Alex lived for vacations. He dragged himself around in the mornings, begging to be allowed to stay home. His teacher said he wasn’t “engaged.” I asked about more challenging classes or programs. “Demographics,” they said. “All our money goes into ‘No Child Left Behind’ programs. There’s just no money to do anything for the kids at the other end of the spectrum. You’ll need to do that at home.”

The classroom was the sacred unit; thirty demographic units, no matter what their experience, skills, or aptitudes, trudged along at a pace guaranteed to Leave No Unit Behind. Perhaps it was the very newness, brightness, and above all, rightness of the school that doomed us. Instead of being a person, Alex became a blip on a chart. Maybe in the end the school was not real to us because we were not real to it.

I expect Alex to have some catching up to do: New school, new school district, new way of doing things. I am not disappointed. Things are different at Freewater Elementary School. Skill levels, not classrooms, are the sacred unit in key areas. Testing happens. “I think I failed a test today, Mom,” Alex says as we make the drive from Milton Freewater to my mother’s house after his first day of school. “I’ve never failed a test before.”

I glance at him. He doesn’t seem unduly concerned; he is busy sorting through a sheaf of cards. “What are those?” I ask.

“Cards the kids made welcoming me to school. They like me, Mom.” His voice has a lilt I haven’t heard in a long time. “They wanted to play with me at recess. I’m so glad we came here.” He goes back to his cards.

Even as my heart lifts at his pleasure in being liked, I worry about the test. Alex is right; he has never failed one before. Even though I expected gaps, it bothers me. Does this prove I am a bad mother? Have I not seen to it that my child knows what he must to survive life in this new place? The thought that the staff might regard us as more to be pitied than censured doesn’t help.

All through that autumn Alex plays catch-up. He gets into trouble for breaking bizarre and arcane rules. Every morning and evening we drive through the Umatilla River Valley and over the highlands past tiny towns tucked under leafy green canopies, then dip down into Milton Freewater. And on those drives, as the sun turns the sky peach, pearl, and azure and the stubble fields to white gold, we talk as we haven’t had time to talk for a long time. We take to leaving the highway and exploring towns visible beyond the fields, half-hidden in trees. I discover that Freewater Elementary isn’t the only pocket of the past to escape the progress transforming more affluent parts of the state. There is this to be said for poverty: Sometimes it helps us preserve the past, simply because we can’t afford anything else. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

In December we finally move into our new house. My first call is to the local cable company, for internet hook-up. I work at home, instead of at Espresso in Motion. The drives through the fields end. Alex sleeps later. He starts dropping teachers’ names  into the conversation. “She likes me,” he says. Or, “He uses kind words.” Or, “She yelled at me. She never did before.” We talk about how every community has rules, and everybody has bad days. “Not Mrs. Ambler,” Alex says. “She never has bad days.”

“I’m here to tell you, she has bad days,” I say, a little testily. “Everybody does. I have bad days.” “I know you do, but she doesn’t,” he says stoutly. “She loves coffee, and she never has a bad day as long as she has her coffee.”

The before-school kickball game is a powerful lure. He takes to getting himself out of bed, showered, and dressed before I call him. When it’s time to leave he is first out the door.

I think about the days in Portland, when getting him to school was a struggle. Test scores and arcane rules notwithstanding, something at Freewater Elementary has engaged him. Surely it won’t last, I think. Mrs. Ambler will give up coffee, and we’ll be right back where we started.

But it does last.

In March, Alex moves up in his reading and math groups. He gets scholastic awards. I take pictures at the assembly, struggling to focus the camera through proud, embarrassing, tears. Alex has been forced to give up everything he knows and start a new life in a new place—and he has done it. I look around at the shabby cafeteria. I watch the teachers handing out homemade certificates, and think, This is what a real school should be. I think about the difference between having a child who slogs through his days, lonely and bored, and having a child who beats me to the car each day and comes home bursting with some new bit of knowledge. I think of cloakrooms, and real bathrooms, and teachers who find my child as real as I find Milton Freewater Elementary School’s beautiful old building.

Something very right has happened, and if arcane rules and preternaturally nice teachers are a part of it, then, by golly, I will stand behind them. I think about the deep honesty, wisdom and courage required to move beyond the politically correct platitudes about how we are all created equal to the simple reality that, when it comes to learning, we are not all equal. Our old school enforced uniformity, setting the bar at the lowest common denominator. Milton Freewater Elementary School acknowledges that children are individuals and they do not all learn the same way—and it has built a system that works, if not for every child, at least for mine.

Maybe that kind of knowing isn’t as easy in a place where everything is new and fresh and works without jiggling wires, a place where folded papers don’t have to be shoved under desk legs to keep them from tipping, a place where there are no hearts scratched deep into desks, with long-ago years and initials inscribed in them.

Maybe in a new building, where everything is uniform, where all rooms are square and all bathroom stall doors lock, it’s possible to see people that way, too—as blips on charts in a world where all members of every group except the one to which we belong look alike. Maybe we only become real as we acquire a few dents, as we learn to make the accommodations that life thrusts upon us. Our dents allow us to become something more than just what we are; our dents make us who we are.

I always disliked The Velveteen Rabbit. Now I find myself thinking that there might be something to the idea that things only become real when they have been loved and used enough to be shabby.

Spring arrives, and our new neighborhood sprouts tulips, daffodils, and children. Alex abandons his PlayStation in favor of the yard. I open the windows and listen to children screaming and laughing as they play Keep Away, Dodge Ball, Kick Ball, and Tag. I think of Portland, where I couldn’t let Alex go outside because children were being stolen, raped, and murdered. He spent his days lying on his stomach, exercising his thumbs. Now he runs and screams with everyone else. The PlayStation stays off for days at a time.

On the way home from school one spring day, Alex says, “Mom, I want to show you the cemetery.”

“Ok-a-a-a-y,” I answer. “Why?”

“We’ve adopted it,” he tells me. “I want to show you my grave. I’m cleaning it up and weeding it. It’s a little girl. Turn here.”

I turn, then turn again, and again, and find myself easing the car up a narrow track. Tall grasses brush the car doors. A wrought-iron arch stands at the top of the hill. “Pioneer Cemetery,” it reads.

Alex leads me over to “his” grave, tells me about the child who is buried there, then shows me the many tombstones for babies and children, talking all the while about hard times, and high child mortality. I listen, and see something in him I have never seen before. He is  interested.  He  cares.  He feels sad at all the young burials. He wants to  learn more. Somehow in the last few months he has developed a sense not only of his present, but of the past.

“We’re going to be having a dedication next week,” he finishes. “Can you come?”

The day of the dedication dawns crisp and clear. The children sing of beautiful spacious skies, and amber waves of grain. Wheat grows thick and green in the field beside the cemetery. I look out over the green, hazy valley, and listen to the bees drunk on spring, and think of the children coming here each year to honor the past. I look at the thick wheat. It’s going to be a good harvest, I think. A uniformed man carries the stars and stripes across the field. A high school girl plays Taps on a cornet. The high, sweet notes soar above us with the meadowlarks. The children sing again.

This is what America is for, I think. Just this. The abundance of the land, honoring those who lived here before us, nurturing the promise of the future. This is right. This is very, very right.

We came to Milton Freewater against our will, angry, hurt, lost, and confused. And like a wise old lady, Freewater Elementary School welcomed us, comforted us with cloakrooms and kickball, eased our way into our new life, gave us room and time to heal, and helped us find our place.

Postscript: Our first year in Milton Freewater was the old Freewater Elementary School building’s last year. The next autumn, the building was demolished. Dang it.

Originally published as “The Velveteen Building,” in Benchmarks: A Single Mother’s Illustrated Journal, by Bodie Parkhurst.