Andrea Masciari

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.

My heart swells with blissful anticipation as I welcome spring each year, red-breasted robins feasting on worms and early morning birds chirping in the quiet distance.  Happy days of drenching rains nourishing all that is life and all that brings joy to the world.  I eagerly wait for another Palm Sunday, a most festive day for my family and me as we celebrate the memories of so many loved ones who have died and left us to remember their lives of grace and integrity and so much soulfulness.

My father woke us early to attend Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston’s South End.  I remember the long procession of parishioners as we slowly made our way through the colossal church while Cardinal Cushing spoke those odd Latin words that all of us, somehow, understood.  This Catholic tradition is still deeply ingrained in our Palm Sundays, except that now we are without Uncle Joe, as he accompanied us each year and guided us all through the deepest memories of his long life. I never thought he would die. I always believed his love for me would keep him alive forever. And when I kissed him goodbye, his icy cheek wasn’t real anymore. His lifeless body, gone perhaps, but his generous spirit lives eternally within those of us lucky enough to have been connected to him.

Most are gone now, those loving men and women who had no idea how enriched my childhood was because of their presence in it.  Uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents and the friends we visit on this yearly pilgrimage to too many cemeteries – our connection to the huge void their deaths have caused in our lives.  But on this day, the void is filled with the kind of warm embrace that can only come from the profound depths of a kindred spirit that binds families and friends, even in this tumultuous world of ours.  The void bursts with happy memories of Uncle Johnnie’s awful-smelling Stogies, the compassionate voices of Uncle Tom and Uncle Frankie; the wisdom of Uncle Carl, and Uncle Bob’s outlandish enthusiasm for all that fate delivered to his door.  My eyes still light up when I recall the docile kindness of Auntie Mary, and Aunt Nanna’s hearty laugh, as they greeted us at the doors of their homes a few short years ago.  Now they greet us at their graves, surrounded by an ever-growing entourage of nephews, and nieces and my Dad, one of the few living siblings; all coming back, year after year, to remember them to each other in a ritual of jokes and the same funny stories over and over again.

Grandpa walked to Boston from Detroit with a hurdy-gurdy man and a monkey on a leash.  No one knows how or why – just that he was a wanderer before he settled down and raised thirteen children.  Uncle Eddie pinched my small cheeks so hard each time he saw me that I still feel the sting of his grasp on my delicate skin – but the sight of me brought such happiness to him that I just held my breath and smiled my best smile.  And Uncle Vinnie, the most handsome of them all; like a prince whenever he walked into our house and kissed my forehead like only a grand uncle ever could.

And I miss Norma, so gentle and beautiful when she died in childbirth, and Bobby who succumbed to the ravages of a cancer that sometimes takes the lives of young and talented photographers.  There are many others, all gone at the hands of diseases and accidents and so sadly, by the stark finality of suicide.  I wish I could touch them all, one by one, and pronounce my deep and lasting love for each of them.  But, alas, I cannot, and so I gather my brothers, my cousins, and my father and head off to fill that deepening void with an early-morning graveyard toast of Uncle Joe’s homemade Anisette.  We pour some of his potion over his grave, along with one of his favorite Bavarian cream donuts, and we meander our way through cemetery after cemetery until the void is finally filled again, with each other, living, laughing, and remembering.