Ghosts
Thomas Wolfe was mostly right about not being able to go home again. Not only are the stones, leaves, and unfound doors all gone or rearranged, but we are also. I had a chance to see my past on a visit to Tampa for an education technology conference. My former psych. teacher was giving one of the workshops, so I popped in to say hello. My old high school had been re-designated as a technology showcase, and the teacher invited me to come by later that day.

The rooms and halls of the school hadn’t changed, but what was being done in them was strikingly different from my era. Kids showed me their projects, and I was amazed to observe learning-disabled students using computers to design cities and analyze chemical compounds.

I visited an old math teacher. Mr. Costanza taught basic geometry, and it was great to see the kids were as rowdy as my peers and I had been. Mr. Costanza and I spoke in the hallway, then he pulled me into his room. “You clowns see this man?” he said. “Look at him--in a suit and tie--carrying a briefcase and working up in the state capital. He was once in my class just like you!” The students were momentarily silent, pondering perhaps the possibility they might one day grow up to be bureaucrats. Then one said, “hey mister, when you were here, did you call Mr. Costanza ‘Mr. Can’t-stand-jah?’” We had indeed; some things do not change.

I had spent much of my time at school in chorus or working on plays. A class was occupying the chorus room, but the auditorium was empty so I slipped in. I tried jumping onto the stage as I once had done, but my age, suit, and briefcase made me miss awkwardly. Using the steps, I stumbled backstage in the dark. Once behind the curtain, I felt compelled to go up into the catwalk where I had passed many hours helping on shows or just fooling around.

The door to one entrance was locked, and the other entrance was 12 feet up. There was a rolling ladder nearby, however; I pushed it over and begin to climb. I was not supposed to be doing this, of course, and was sure someone would discover me and report it to the principal who had just given me a tour of the school. I feared, idiotically, that he would call my mother. Up I went, holding the ladder with one hand and the briefcase with the other.

The dusty passage to the catwalk was cluttered with old props and utterly dark. But my hands and feet remembered where to go, even though it had been years since they had guided me through here. I passed a trap door from which other boys and I had once peeped into the girls’ dressing room, and headed around over the chorus room. Singing filtered up through the floor like a muted memory, and I tiptoed to avoid detection.

The catwalk circles the auditorium and arches up over its ceiling so lights can be hung for shows. I moved toward the ladder to the top. As my eyes acclimated to the dimness, I started at something moving on the wall. No, not moving, I realized, but the walls were covered with vine-like swirls. It was writing—a maze of hundreds of spray-painted names that resembled urban graffiti. Starting a couple of years before my time, graduating thespians began a tradition of painting their names on the walls.

I strained to find names I recognized. There, amid the black singularity of the aerosol inscriptions, my classmates were still there. They had used real paint--even greasepaint--and they shone through: Michael, Cheryl, Randy, and in a vivid yellow high above the rest, Karen.

But the names did not give me comfort. Instead, the glow of classmates and recollection faded and I felt the ghosts of hundreds of shows pressing at me and seeming to say, “get out—you don’t belong here.” It was true. This place was for youth--a secret spot for them to talk of hopes and failures, to dream, and to look down and ponder the theatre of life below and ahead. It was no longer my place.

I padded over the band room and down the other entrance, which as I remembered could be opened from the inside. I stepped out the backstage door and into sunshine so bright it made my eyes water.