Arrivederci
Goodbye Daniel Butler School – a wonderful structure of learning and friendship. So much of childhood spent within its happy rooms, lovingly sustained by the caring educators and staff who enter the wooden doors every day to bring to each waiting child, a sense of timelessness and belonging and place. The Butler School is an institution of academic learning, but it is so much more than that. It is a community as diverse as the world is large, and my family, privileged participants in the generosity of this diversity in the midst of our otherwise, sometimes intolerant world. With over 26 languages spoken during our years at the Butler school, our home has been filled with the speakers of those words. Some of our more boisterous gatherings have included children from over twelve countries at a time, bringing with them their cultures and their beautiful hearts and minds. Sadly, many return to their much-loved homelands, taking their voices with them. But they always leave a part of themselves with us, and we hold onto them in letters, in phone calls and with immeasurable heartfelt memories. I hope we are with them too.
Now it is time, after our final phase of elementary school, to enter the real world that life has to offer. All things, good and bad, will infiltrate the lives of our children as reality opens its doors to their innocent expectations. We’ll have to guide them through thick and thin without benefit of compassionate grade school teachers and a principal who knows the names of every child’s siblings, and I hope we will succeed. I hope we will look back, in retrospect, and recall these glory days of impressive art projects gracing the walls of our little school and those of the Sovereign Bank on Concord Ave. I for one will close my eyes on difficult days and hear the musical assemblies that bring tears to the eyes of people like me. Tears of pride for a music teacher who can gather together, seemingly without effort, over 100 children and produce a heart-wrenching hour of simple harmony among those faces of color and character and youth. All with the same smiles of joy in the pride they feel for the school they love so much.
We’ll celebrate our Fourth Grade Moving On Ceremony with speeches of gratitude and loud rounds of applause for the special people who make the Butler School a hidden gem tucked out of the way of the mainstream. The children will play games and give hugs to those who have led them through the rigors of MCAS as well as the comedies and tragedies of childhood in America in the twenty-first century. Their childhood – marred by the ignorance of terrorism and the scariness of monsters lurking in the darkest corners of our beloved country. There exists a sense of hopelessness, sometimes, in the hearts of the parents who must bear witness to and give refuge from the horror of it all.
Oh, how I wish time could stand still for this moment just before our children say goodbye to their comrades. I wish time could give back to us snapshots of our little boys and girls in perfect parallel against the playground wall for the very first time – crisp new backpacks and spanking white sneakers ready and willing to explore this new world of theirs. I see my two young boys reaching for the stars and grasping in their outstretched minds, a love of learning and of life itself. And I hope that peace will find them all in their journey through life, in love, in ecstasy.
I remember the preying mantis on my schoolhouse windowsill, its awesome presence imbedded in my distant first-grade memories. I remember the penny my best girlfriend and I buried in the schoolyard dirt, a symbol of our undying friendship. And I recall, when I close my eyes real tight, how it feels to leave the past behind. Our children will remember too, and I suspect they will always know that the doors that opened up for them at the Daniel Butler School, will one day welcome their children into its friendly halls filled with music and art and joy.