Glenridge Downstairs

When the Glenridge afternoon program began, I was entering a new phase of awareness.  At 4½ I was no longer a baby, and I didn’t feel the same as the babbling toddler I’d been a year before.  Unlike the morning program, we were downstairs, always a few steps away from running out into the canyon that surrounded us.  My teachers upstairs have receded into memory, but Helen and Barbara are as clear as the paper and pen before me.  Helen’s long sleeve shirts of denim or flannel, her curled black hair, thick 80’s glasses and, upon review of photographs, very Jewish features.  Her soft voice, the way she looked us in the eye while reading to us, we children, arranged in 2 concentric semicircles for storytime.  Scrambling after her on nature hikes beneath eucalyptus trees that swayed and whispered above us, leaving scythe shaped leaves and many sided nuts on the forest floor to be found and pocketed, both of which contain smells that instantly take me back to those days, not just as memories, but through my senses.  As fast as the speed of light the world skyscrapes up above me and the ground rises to meet me and a dark aura surrounds me with the lemony scent of eucalyptus.  Much more distant, as if from another world, is the light, stuffy inside wonder of the upstairs morning program, this feeling of the mysterious world presenting its doors and paths to me for the first time.  And no less a presence was Barbara, her husky voice leading us to the corners of the room for art projects, squeezing clay and smearing paint across large sheet of off-white construction paper.  From her, admonishing felt only a different side of the coin of laughing.  We ran giggling on the tops of the logs and hiked up the hill to spaceship rock, an outcropping of stone that resembled the millennium falcon in some way I can feel but not understand anymore.  What is the secret to this time of my life, of exploration and love, when I cried on the weekends because I wanted Glen Canyon, Glenridge, the trees, the creek, the smells of papier mache, wet earth and eucalyptus trees.  Barbara and Helen, my friends Jason and Jason and Justin?  Why do I feel a hint of it on my yearly family trip to Yosemite, or the mountains of Sequoia, the dust of black rock city, the empty days in the woods and playa?  Places that finally have room to be filed with the present moment?  And I wonder if much of my anxieties of daily are not from fear of it, but a side effect of the constant forgetting I must do to drive in traffic and go to work , to pay the  bills and vacuum the carper, instead of running through the forgetmenots and fennel among the dirt path in the woods to meet my younger self on a rock of rivulets and corners, a boy who is manning the helm as we blast off into space.