Back at it

I attended a concert this past weekend, my first since March 7, 2020. Elaine was in the orchestra; I was up in the balcony. The program was short. The highlight was Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. If, like me, you’ve never heard it, I would enthusiastically recommend listening.

The strange thing about being back in the hall after all this time: it felt, really, as if no time had passed. Elaine and I came up with this hypothesis: perhaps it’s when the place itself has changed that we most register time’s passing. Everything about the concert hall was the same. But in a store where we hadn’t shopped since March 2020, and which was remodeled in our absence: there we knew that time had passed. And that reminded me of when I entered a basement thrift store and realized that it had once been the club where I’d heard Son Seals, Koko Taylor, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

When I visited my Brooklyn elementary school in 1987 and 1998, the hallways and fixtures and staircases looked the same. The auditorium and gymnasium looked the same. The school basement even smelled the same. There too it was if no time had passed. I of course had changed since elementary schooldays — at least slightly. But walking through the hallways, I felt like my kid self, back in school, not like a stranger in a strange land.

For at least four years now, my elementary school has been covered in protective screening, with sidewalk sheds turning the pavements into dark tunnels. A sign from the NYC School Constrution Authority reads

Exterior Masonry
Flood Elimination
Roof Replacement
Parapets Replacement

I’m not sure what I’d feel if I were to revisit my school now.

[As I realized when I reread my earlier post, the P.S. 131 classrooms had changed. But their doors were locked, and I could only look through the windows. Perhaps that‘s why I remembered the things that hadn’t changed, the spaces I was able to enter.]