Upon opening the AP Seminar PT2 Stimulus packet just about a month ago, I was all but overwhelmed by the indigestible lexicon and terminology that created this 82-page document. I decided to tackle this monster of a Performance Task one Stimulus source at a time—the first being a 6-page report about nostalgia.
Now this captured my attention. Nostalgia has piqued my interest ever since I discovered its meaning. I remember being in the seventh grade, brainstorming a nostalgic song I hoped to make with my friend—though, how a 13-year-old could be nostalgic about events of just three years ago, I have no idea. I imagined the music video would be filmed at Pine Ridge’s playground, my old elementary school; how we would wear bright-colored clothing and pigtails and eat lollipops, in the true fashion of my childhood.
I actually got the chance to visit Pine Ridge twice within this school year. Once this fall and once last week, I was on a mission to get the elementary students to see the FHC theater productions. I was excited. What fun it would be to see my old classrooms and teachers; to visit the library I once called my home?
However, when I arrived, I walked through the halls, thinking one simple thought: this place used to feel much bigger.
The hallways that used to feel expansive now felt cramped and narrow. The lunchroom now looks like a large classroom, rather than the dome of childish mingling and clamor that it used to hold.
Most of all, the library that seemed to have every piece of knowledge in the world now looked exactly as it was designed to be: elementary. I am now tall enough to peer over the bookcases that used to hold all that I loved about school, imagination. I am now old enough that the “stage” where Mrs. Z read to us, where I began my theater journey, now looks exactly like what it is: a small, carpeted platform.
Not only that, but a great deal of the school has changed. The furniture and layout of the school have been updated, much like the high school. Upon visiting the playground, I found that it had changed, too. The spinning platforms where my friends and I used to compete over who could stay on the longest were now uprooted; the four square and basketball lines on the pavement had faded with age.
Alas, though I long for the old desks and chairs that constituted my memories of elementary school, I can’t help but repeat to myself that change is good. It is something that happens naturally, as an effect of one reason or another. Change is not for the purpose of change but for the purpose of improvement. Change is good.
But there is something about the disillusionment of childish wonder that makes me feel I will never be happy about something again. Whatever happened to the rush I felt when running through the playground’s soccer field, to the passion of reading the books I now find silly? Whatever happened to the big lunch room filled with excitement over whatever meal was being served and the following recess?
But, as the elementary students lined up for lunch, my bitter perspective of nostalgia was soon replaced.
It became clear as I conversed with hundreds of children that, though the school in which my childhood took place has changed, the children inside them have not.
Childlike wonder doesn’t exist within the glorified establishments that I venerate in memory—it exists in the children. In the children who curiously asked me everything possible about theater, who let me play Gaga ball with them in my constricting costume. Who cheered as I, before saying goodbye, returned their strayed soccer ball over the fence with a final, symbolic punt.
As I waved one final goodbye to the kids on the playground, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied with my journey. I had come not to see my fourth grade class photo, nor the new renovations to the building, but the smiles on hundreds of young faces.
