In School-days

In School-days

Some things in life are better than others, and one thing that is better unto best is time at Holy Nativity Episcopal School. Anytime, day or night.

In the Bill Lloyd Building there, the hall and every classroom teams with the happiness of children regardless of day or hour, year or season. My only memories of feet that, creeping slow to school, as Whittier says, were my Cove School years 1943-44 and 1945-46, when Ruthless Ruth made it her sole mission my third grade and fifth grade years, to show the entire class and my parents that I did not understand the math and had not done the social studies homework. 

Oh! There was one other apocalypse. The sixth grade teacher finally grew so exasperated with my arriving seven minutes after the final bell every morning without fail that she sent me to the principal’s office. In retrospect, the principal had been forewarned, because she was laying for me and had a go at me. The principal’s office that April 1947 doomsday was the same room that eons later was my office as School Chaplain and Middle School Religion & Ethics Teacher, and that is the Head’s office today. That one doorway is still foreboding 65 years on. Feet never again crept slow to school.

Last evening was quiet. Summer 2010 the Holy Nativity School Foundation had the windows tinted in two classrooms because the sun on the huge windows made the spaces uncomfortably hot at times even with air conditioning going full blast. In the two school years since then, the tinting has been so successful that we are doing a couple more rooms, starting yesterday after school. The 3M film stops 75% of the heat coming in and 99% of the sun’s ultraviolet rays. 

Tom of TMS Tinting, the only 3M licensed dealer in the area, has been doing it for 38 years. And Tom reports that Gulf Power Company currently gives a one-time dollar a square foot rebate on the electric bill to encourage installation of this energy saving feature in homes and businesses. 

My work while Tom began tinting was to remember and smile. No charcoal frescoes, though one of the fourth grades has evidence of a history lesson in the hall outside their classroom.

The charcoal frescos on its wall;

   Its door’s worn sill, betraying

The feet that, creeping slow to school,

   Went storming out to playing! 

Tom W

From “In School-days” by John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807-1892