Close your eyes and think of walking down the hallway toward Third & Main. And, by the way, I don’t know which was Third and which was Main … and neither do you.
If your vision isn’t one of cocooning, sunset-colored brick walls and archways, warmth and nurture, and a words-fail-me sort of got-your-back presence, then something is wrong with the calibration on your sense of what-used-to-be. Maybe you don’t use enough hyphens. Or, maybe, you’re just not right.
The bricks that were the essential part and parcel of that sense of all’s–well-with-the-world were probably nothing special to the masons who had to lift then up onto the scaffolding, day after day, and then apply the mortar and place them to the exacting tolerances of plumb and level. With the proficiency that comes with doing any task a million times, the bricks saw themselves transformed from stacks of building material into our walls, archways, vaults and cues of architectural fantasy. It’s one of those choreographed motions that, when you watch a master craftsman do it, looks so simple, so fluid. But, well, hmmm ... have you ever tried to spackle an 8’ drywall joint and have it look perfect the first time? Enough said.
You have to wonder how much Mr. Longnecker and Miss Folger had to say about the brickage. Could they extrapolate what a million bricks sitting on pallets, given the right amount of bibbity, bobbity, boo, would end up looking like? Was it something they saw in the first Fairview that worked so well, it was unimaginable not to use it again? Maybe a recent edition of Better Schools & Gardens? Add that to the list of things we’ll never know.
The school’s three main stairwells were brick from top to bottom, and a coat or two of amber shellac, after everything had cured, transformed them into the warm and fuzzy we remember. I know it was shellac because, either 1) I know everything there is to know about period masonry finishes, or 2) I saw a large container of shellac in the school’s paint locker when I snuck my way into the basement boiler room. In any case, shellac was ideal to cover a multitude of sins. It sealed the raw, rough brick surface and made it easy to clean. It allowed for 80 years of student class officer vote-for-me signs and pep-rally tomorrow-after-sixth-period posters being attached with masking tape, with no worry about gobs of adhesive residue nastiness.
Most importantly, however, the shellac imparted a permanence, a sense of mass, and that deep, rich, honey-flavored glow of much of what your mind’s eye sees when you remember Fairview. But then, that does still depend on whether your eyes are still shut from when I told you to, back in the first paragraph. Pity there are some people who just don’t get it.
You have to believe it wasn’t an accident.
Now that the scene is set, the props in place and the last stagehand out of the way, as you walk up the stairs from the first floor intersection of Third & Main, before you get to the landing, you’ll be good enough to notice the word “DOWN” with an arrow built in to it, pointing to the lower left, stenciled on the brick wall to your left. I believe the font was “Old School.” Now, unless this “DOWN” was part of a subtle marketing campaign for high-end Canadian comforters, I have to think it’s a directional graphic.
The scary thing is that I do remember it being there in the ‘60s and having absolutely no idea what it was about. And no, I’m not going to tell you whether I actually obeyed it, but at the risk of embarrassing myself even more, I will tell you that each time I transited those steps, I made it a point to reach up and try to touch it for good luck. You’d think after the first fifty times, I’d have realized it didn’t work.
So, help me out here. I was honor roll as often as not and I’m clueless. Let’s take a leap of faith and say that someone wanted you to use those stairs only to go down. I know, I know. Usually you only get that kind of revelation from post-doctoral studies. Now, don’t get ahead of me here, but wouldn’t you think that somewhere there’d be at least one correspondingly inexplicable “UP” stencil, complete with an arrow just to insult your intelligence? Well, I’m here to tell you, there isn’t one, or even two. Trust me, I looked high and low, and neither is there isn’t any evidence that there once was and it got erased out of existence. The only other stencil I know of was the word “balcony” on the second floor, in the landing above the entrance to the cafeteria, telling us where to head for the permanent gym seating. They must have used up all the makes-sense-to-me on that one.
I suppose we’ll all be left to ponder just what happened to precipitate the “DOWN.” Was there a time when Miss Folger and her posse were trying to get back to the office from the library to get an important phone call, just as the bell rang for changing classes? That would not have been pretty … like salmon trying to swim up-stream through the electric power turbines. So what, the next day the sign went up so history could never repeat itself? Far fetched, sure, but I’m still waiting for your better idea.
Hang on a minute. It all gets a whole lot weirder.
I said my good-byes to Fairview in the fine company of Baileys Irish Cream and certainly had no interest in driving seventy-five miles to see heavy power equipment do what it does. Some part of me thought the best Fairview bricks might get recycled and sold as elite used brick for fancy new digs in Oakwood, Centerville, Tipp City or anyplace where property taxes only know how to go up. Then too, I suppose there was a time when I wondered if there was a hierarchy of debris in the landfill. Certainly the Fairview material would rise to the top, above anything from Colonel White or Meadowdale.
Duh.
I didn’t even think about getting a “souvenir” brick when offered. Some reminders are just too brutal, too confrontational. But when one day my daughter drove over to Dayton to pick out a couple bricks for me as a surprise, I decided I could pretend to appreciate the gesture.
The first brick out of the grocery bag was nondescript and offered no hint as to its past life. The second one might as well have screamed at me from a mile away. On turning it over, I first noticed a coat of shellac was perfectly intact on one surface and then parts of stenciled black letters seemed visible … W ... N, unless my letter recognition program was faulty. And there aren’t enough upper case numbers to express my disbelief at what I was seeing.
I could only think it was like the wand picking the wizard. Was I supposed to give it a good home until it was time to rebuild the school? And when our sun blows up, takes our world with it and our scattered atoms become parts of other worlds, perhaps some force of All Things Fairview in a parallel universe will orchestrate a grand gathering and re-assemble all the necessary parts as a monument for all things good.
What are the chances?
I guess it depends on whether you believe in Brick.
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