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An ending, some coffee, & adventures
May. 24th, 2013 10:25 amBack porch again! I'm surprised. It's just chilly enough to need some sleeves over my tank top.
It's Bryan's last day at school. Literally. He will pack up all of his things & drive away from Weiner High School for the last time, and like every single teacher there, he will probably have tears in his eyes as he drives (which is not really safe but HEY). Everything they have done this year has been like the last wish of a dying person. Every party was savored & well-attended. Everyone was enthusiastic about participating in everything. Graduation was bittersweet, and last night they held what amounted to a memorial service for the school: 1888-2013. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm told it was a tear-jerker; if you made it through all the students telling what being a student here has meant to them, there was apparently a photograph with some music that was calculated to make you cry. If you made it through that...well, no one made it through the final shot, which is a shot of an otherwise empty high school hallway, with just my son & his BFF Maggie walking alone away from the camera, wearing their WHS shirts that say "Our Time" on the back. Hell, I haven't even seen it & just the description makes me cry (it made my mom & aunt, both WHS grads, cry too). I hope someone sends a copy to each member of the state board of education, frankly.
So many experiences we will still have, but I can't help but think of the experiences that have been lost by the closing of this school. Bryan will not get to collaborate with Ms. Hesse the incredible GT teacher anymore. He won't get to work all his years & retire from the same school, which he's repeatedly said he could do if he stayed at Weiner. Ganon won't get the experience of growing up & graduating with the same core group of kids he started kindergarten with. He won't get to be in the most amazing gifted & talented program I've ever heard of.
I'm just sad. It's like the funeral is over, and now is when we have to start moving on. Bryan says the last thing he's going to tell Pam before he leaves (the principal) is that if something crazy ever happens & they get to open the school back up, to put him first on the list to call.
In much more shallow yet happy news, the new Starbucks is open! Apparently they opened last night. I think I might go there for an afternoon pick-me-up just to check it out. This is not news anywhere else in the world, but Jonesboro has never had a stand-alone Starbucks. We've had the one in Target, but nothing else. The only actual coffeehouse type place we had for years was a place called The Edge Coffeehouse on the edge (natch!) of ASU campus, but it is not convenient to anyplace else in town due to university traffic flow. Panera came in last year & that's better, but now I have 3 options for when I want to take my iPad & go do grad school things someplace other than home. :) Plus, they have the full Starbucks menu, & I have to hand it to them: sometimes Starbucks has some DELIGHTFUL little coffee pastries. (One summer, years ago when we were in Dallas, Starbucks had this almond thing: a thin yellow cake about the depth of a jelly roll pan, covered with a layer of extremely thinly sliced almonds overlapping like scales, and drizzled with a very subtle glaze. They have never had it again that I know of, and I MISS IT.)
This week starts another whirlwind of fun! Tomorrow we meet Mimi & Augie in Hot Springs. We will spend a night there, & from there, Ganon will go home with them. I work on Monday, but then after that we pack for Wakarusa on Thursday! We will be happily ensconced on Mulberry Mountain in the Ozark National Forest. I will listen to music to my heart's content, drink wine from local vineyards, & eat some food that is vegan & some that is decidedly not vegan (I will never figure out who decided to place the vegan stir-fry place next door to the guy doing beef roast last year. :)
As for a photo of the day, well...this happened!
