Visiting Old Stomping Grounds

Before we left the Bay Area for the Sacramento area, I attended a few months of Selby Lane Elementary School in kindergarten. After arriving in Citrus Heights, I started kindergarten right after Christmas break. Our school, which was walking distance even after we moved a few months later to the Basswood house (where Dan still rules from on high), was (and is still) called Lichen Elementary. It's named after the street, which is named after a prehistoric fungus that affects most of the trees in the neighborhood.

On one of the days that I was up helping out, I had some time that was open while Dan and Richard worked on household fix-er-ups and my mom napped, so I took Dan's bike out over to Lichen, and then off to Westwood Park, an equally close by park that Norm and I certainly hung out at more often than I ever did when I was a kid going to Lichen.

Considering it's been 21 years since I stopped attending Lichen, it's kinda neat how little has changed while accounting for how much has changed.

I was looking through the pictures I took and was kinda surprised. I pretty much took pictures, not deliberately, of all the spots where I had a class during my K-6 grades. I was going to post pictures here, pictures of places that held memories for me, when I realized I could do that through my classes as well. But I decided not to, rather wait for that project until later. So, more like regular pictures...

Lichen is now a K-8 school, and I took a picture that tells me something of the demographics attending a now sought after schooling destination:

Two languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet? I'm guessing one is Russian, since Sacramento has a very populous Russian contingent, and I'll guess that the other is Ukrainian, since that is another of the Russo-Slavs to be residences of Sac. (I read that a while back the Slavs split into an upper sub-group and a lower sub-group; the uppers became Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, while the lowers were the remaining Slavic groups.)

I don't remember the neighborhood being so full of white ethnics...either I wasn't listening hard enough, or Lichen is an important destination.

This picture and the next are Edvard Munch-ish, and show some of the long hallways that lead to playgrounds and recess.

The next shot opens out onto the recess area, and actually has recreational area on two sides. When I attended school, there were less permanent structures situated in a line perpendicular to the plane this bank of doors is on, and would have been visible here at the end of the line, where it now opens up to grass. I had two classes in those missing portables...

This planter box/circulation controller was very important for me, especially after I realized it was shaped like Superman's chest logo.

I always liked the shapes that this connection of roofing elements made with the sky...

During the early recesses this bathroom/water fountain area was shaded, and was a nice stop in after a rousing game of prison ball, basketball, or running and such off in the adjacent field. Football was played on the Lichen Drive side of the playground, while other grassy sports were played on this side's grass lands, the field tucked into the neighborhood. The football side had their own bathroom setup like this, but farher away from here. The men's room is on the left side of the picture, and is the first place I heard anyone claim the "Bloody Mary" phenomena truly worked. I was skeptical and didn't believe that "it" was possible, but I never tried it myself to prove or disprove.

What "Bloody Mary" phenomena is that, you may ask? Well, at Lichen, ca. 1988, the story went that if you turned your back on the mirror and said "Bloody Mary" three times, when you turned around the visage of a somehow now summonsed banshee or ghoul named "Bloody Mary" would be staring back at you. Magic in the mirrors.

Seeing as how I'm a science guy and a mathematician nowadays, and skeptical barely begins to describe how I approach things, I can safely say I know what will happen if I try to conjure "Bloody Mary" up in a mirror: a tiny part of the child-like mystery from the world of youth will die forever.

I still haven't ever let that sense of mystery die.

Here's a shot of two wings of class rooms, their intersection is the point from the picture before about the "shapes created against the sky". Four-square courts ready and prison ball courts just out of frame. For clarification's sake, what we called "prison ball" was called "dodgeball" in the Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn movie of the same name. It was the same game. What we called "dodgeball" was a different game, where either one kid or a group of kids were at the center of a circle of kids who were ready with the ball-weapons.

After leaving Lichen I rode down to our first house in Citrus Heights, the house on Castleberry Circle. We lived there for a few months before moving to the Basswood house.

Nothing says Citrus Heights like the terminus of Zenith into Butternut. Seriously, these are two, eh, "important" CH streets, well, important in the cut, and one merges into the other deep in the cut.

This is the creek/drainway at Westwood Park. To the left of this picture are the two playgrounds that have conventional jungle-gyms. One side is smaller than the other, and the structure lets you know that it's for the littlest-adventurers. The bigger side always had the greatest large-scale jungle-gyms. Towering fortresses if fiberglass and curved steel. They've changed much of it since Norm and Shannon and Trishta and Curtis and I would teach younger hoodlums how to hood it up. Sometimes even Melly Mel was there. It's still representing big playground-ness. I felt funny taking pictures though, what with parents giving me the stink-eye.

This creek though, is where I saw Chris Farley catch crawdads, or attempt to catch them with hot-dog bits on string. (The bridge is newer than my last trip.)

To the right is a large expanse of grass that you could take your dogs to, or play catch, or practice baseball. I had practices here, on the large green grassy area, but strangely, never any games on the local diamond off behind the big-kids playground.

Behind the sign you can almost see one of the jungle-gyms. The original sign, or what counts as original for me and mine, was a wooden thing up at the corner of the property. Now the grassy area has a basketball court and a tennis court and far less open green grass, but it's still kinda cool.

Some young hoodlums saw me taking these pictures, as they were getting out of their car and taking a spot on a picnic table that isn't but twenty feet behind my back as I took this picture. They were mugging me in a curious way, not quite menacing, but they would have done so if I'd acted differently. They were more curious (I used that word to describe them, not their mugging ways).

So, if you know me, then you know what I did. I put my camera away, turned to face the kids, walked right over to their table and had a seat. One kid fumbled trying to light his cigarette.

They asked if I was a photographer (I was also carrying Corrie's Pentax 35mm SLR film-camera). I smiled and said it was a hobby. I told them that I grew up around the corner, that I went to Lichen, and that my friends and I used to come up to the park and get loaded and scare the younger punks. They thought that was funny.

I told them that the last time I regularly hung out at Westwood, there were no basketball courts or tennis courts, and that the green grass went on the whole way. "Damn!" they laughed, followed by a when was that line of questioning.

When was that? I thought about it, wanting to be as fully accurate as I could. It was before I'd left Sac for San Luis Obispo the second time, which was in 2000, and I'd been serious about school for maybe 10 months before that.

"Eh, I guess that was in...1999," I nodded as I said it, and they erupted into a chorus of damns and sheeeits.

"You're old!"

"Yup...I surely am," I nodded with a laugh.

I performed the handshake-to-fist-bump action that constitutes farewell gesturing in certain pockets of society, bid them adieu, and rode off back to Basswood, back to the easiest going bride and groom pair I've ever had the pleasure of being around.