The high school I went to went from Kindergarten to 12th grade. It was very very tiny; I graduated with 12 kids in my class.
Behind the school was a large open area and I’d help out with the younger kids during lunchtime recess sometimes as part of what Seniors did there.
Towards the end, I looked out and I saw the keyhole through the foliage, the hill rising up behind it, everybody visible in overcoats, and thought “I’d better capture this”. These were the days before phone cameras -1990 – but I’d brought in a camera to get a few pictures that day. Blurry, cheap camera – probably a 110 disposable. Have to pay to develop pictures, etc.
Yet, here, captured in time, 32 years ago, a moment of play full of children who are now grown, who all went to a school that ceased to exist entirely in 1991, just a year later – a move none of us saw coming.
As the internet was relatively small in scope compared to now, by the time people were keeping databases of schools online to make money bringing together classmates and such, Vail-Deane might as well never have existed in the first place and if it had, it would be shown as from Elizabeth NJ as an historical building, not at its final resting place where I’d attended in Mountainside, NJ, which barely is findable as a fact online except for a few alumni groups here and there.
Yet here they are, frozen in a moment of play, names known as a set (those who went to the school) but unlikely to figure out who is who. Just little blobs of fuzzy color in a fuzzy field with fuzzy trees but with clear memories.