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<\/a><\/p>\nI grew up maybe a half-hour from Newtown, Connecticut, in a town called Ridgefield that, today, became momentarily someplace you might know about when someone spotted someone with a gun (or something) near one of the schools and all of the schools in town went on lockdown.\u00a0 That would have included Ridgebury Elementary School, where I went, high up on a hill in an out of the way part of town, surrounded by woods and bordered by a swampy area at the bottom of a grade that was great for sledding in the winter.<\/p>\n
If you walked in the front entrance to the school, the office would be on your left, and past that, turning left in front of a large tapestry, a hallway that seemed forever long to a six year old waiting for classes to start on the first day, the nurse and guidance counselor offices on the left, a bank of windows looking over quintessential New England on the right.\u00a0 I sat in that hallway on an October day in 1987 waiting for classes to start, nervous and alone, closely examining my sneakers and the snow outside.\u00a0 The hallway teed into the library, where I once put on a puppet show to tell the story of the Lorax with friends.\u00a0 Down the hall to the right were the art rooms, where I would spend lunches and some time after school, especially in the older grades, working on a large collaborative painting of a walled garden with the other children termed \u201cgifted artists\u201d and where, once a year, we would come together, those same “gifted artists,” to create the school banner for our four-elementary-school Field Day, red and white in our colors,\u00a0loudly attempting to win the day.\u00a0 Back the other way were the classrooms, and below them the art spaces\u2014the music room, where Mr. Lebekin would lead us patiently in rhythm exercises, turning da-dada-DA<\/em> into a group competition and crowning a winner who got to hold the Sock-It-To-Me Award, a green woolen sock with a tacky medal sewn on, and for which said winner would be serenaded by the class and made to feel generally special in song.<\/p>\n The auditorium across the hall is where I stood on a stage and sang in the school musical about having a crush on a girl and even then felt something was a little wrong in the sentiment, and where, at Christmas time, they would set up little tables and you would bring in photos from home and make buttons and magnet using amazing machines that popped the photo behind plastic and backed it with a metal piece, and that you could take home and give with pride as presents at just this time of year.\u00a0 Down the hall, near the cafeteria, where everyone waiting for lunch had to line up, and so everyone had to see,\u00a0there was a wall where, though I\u2019m sure it\u2019s long painted over now, I had the honor of painting a block, a cinder block, one of just a few people asked to do so each year, to commemorate my five years at Ridgebury.\u00a0 Red and white, prideful, included.<\/p>\n Our classrooms were bright and bursting with color, paints and glues and glitter and paper wrapping me up in a feeling, 25 years later, of incredible comfort and security and celebration.<\/p>\n It gives me physical pain to think what all that bright bursting color would look like smeared with blood and shot through with bullets.\u00a0 I found myself grasping about, thinking about what I do, wondering, in the least clicheed way possible, what the point was.<\/p>\n