The Past (My Past) and The Landmarks, Boundaries and Monuments of My Childhood in Kittery 1985-1998

As I promised in a quondam entry, I have returned to dole out descriptions of various places familiar to me in Kittery when I was a boy-which, somewhat lamentably, is no longer true of me. Quondam, of course, means 'former'; but such literary posturing and didactic outwardness is hardly important. I just prefer to be honest in these-perhaps too honest. Sometime, and I know this has almost nothing to do with the actual subject of this blog, but I would like to write a sort of an open letter to those shitholes who betrayed and judged so harshly, so wrongly at Market Basket-for there I suffered an intense betrayal that I shall not ever be able to forget, having never faced similar injustice, misinterpretation, harassment and betrayal at any previous time in my life; a life which I can remember almost all of. Almost everything that ever happened within it.
One such thing, one such place-and I know that placing this first is completely out of order, but who the hell cares?-is Frisbee Middle School, on Rogers Road in Kittery, Maine, where I went to, a school I attended during the years 1993-1997. Four years; four grades...fifth, sixth, and...well, you know the rest. It is called Frisbee Elementary School now, and the school that was my elementary or primary school in the years 1988-1992 or 1993, that school, Shapleigh Elementary School is now, and has been for more than eleven years, Shapleigh Middle School; and as far as I'm concerned, influx of new residents to the region, or influx of new children being born, or population boom or financial/spatial/municipa

l concerns and constraints notwithstanding, there was no reason to ever shuffle the schools like that; hell, even back when I was there, at them, though they were both at least thirty-five years old (probably older, actually) they required very little exterior/interior renovation...yet sometime around 1997 or 1998 or so, they were renovated, refurbished, rebuilt and expanded, the both of them-although any rebuilding or expansion at Frisbee was negligible at best and entirely confined to the interior of the school! Yet the object of this writing was not to link up so much introspection and narrative, nor to devote myself to too much commentary and criticism. Having said that, I will push on:
To describe Frisbee Middle School, established and built in 1940 and looking like it was built about forty years earlier than that, I would say: The grounds of the school itself were, as they still are, separated from the road by a chest or head-high chain-link fence that wraps around the baseball field that stands at the foot of the playground-a playground that no longer exists. It is a gently sloping hill, and below the slope is a plain, is a flat spot, perfectly manicured and tended and very green, especially in the springtime. A thin row of ironically thick trees runs up the east side of the playground/baseball field area, cordoning it off from the nearby residential area. Indeed, the grounds of the school are somewhat sandwiched by tiny, little neighborhoods of perhaps ten to twenty homes each. They bound it on the west and on the east. A forest stands immediately behind the school; well, at least behind it's rear (and only official) parking lot. The school itself is a two story brick building that is somehow trapezoidal and is of an immense size. It seems to dwarf all and everything; especially to a little boy, such as myself when I first went there. The central entrance is housed within a large brick arch that has a yellow wooden wall with moldings in it and facing outward; yet that is not the only entrance or exit to the school. There were and are also three large doors from the front of the beveled-roofed, semi-cylindrical gymnasium, whose roof, while large, high and soaring, only reaches up to about the middle of the second story of the building, the school proper, itself. Yet, there are and were at least four to six other exits/entrances, most of them strategically located at all the points of cardinal direction: east, west, north, south and so on. The windows were made of either sickly yellow wood or steel, and each classroom had at least three and they were massive and had trim that divided the panes into separate sections so that there were about probably thirty-six little rectangles of glass in each and every window. Overtopping each of the sections, the main section of two massive, abnormally tall stories, and the annex section; which only consisted of one story and was like a smaller, shorter, narrower version of the main building, with the exception of the gymnasium that separated the two sections, for of course, it did not have a smaller copy of that attached to it; above both of these segments of the school were and are one tower, called a cupola, each. There is the main cupola, a vast, tall tower surrounded by green-shuttered windows and topped with a sharp, steel spire, and of course, having wooden panels of a sickly yellow shade; and there is the smaller, tinier cupola that tops the roof of the annex, but that, while smaller, still has a spire to rival the one that stands above it. Originally, I think the school had been built to be a hospital during World War Two, or perhaps they converted it to one then; although, if that was true, that seems insane, given the fact that most of the casualties from the battlefield would have been at least 1500 miles from Frisbee, so that seems to be an apocryphal piece of local history; one that I obviously misunderstood or misheard. There is more to the school of course; much more, but I am tired and in a few hours I have to go to work, so any further history or description of either the exterior or the interior of Frisbee Middle School (Frisbee Elementary School now and since 1998) will have to be given in a later blog..perhaps tomorrow's. Until then, then.