The following originally aired as a local commentary on NPR-member station WIUM/WIUW Tri States Public Radio. You can read/ listen to more of my essays here.
I’ve never been big on the idea of going back home for Homecoming.
In all the years that I’ve been out of high school, I’ve never felt a need to return to my hometown to watch as the most popular girl and guy are adorned with crowns.
Four years of that was plenty for me, thanks.
But this year my sister called me and talked me into going.
This Homecoming was being billed as the “last ever” for Carthage High School.
Like so many other small towns in Illinois, the one I grew up in has had to face the fact of declining population. Next year, Carthage High School will have a new name, a new mascot, and a new crop of students—as the high schools in neighboring Dallas City and LaHarpe converge with Carthage.
To commemorate the last Carthage Homecoming, a group of longtime Carthage residents put together a celebration, complete with a street dance, a sports memorabilia auction, and a self-guided tour of all the buildings in the district.
I didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
It seemed silly to commemorate the “end” of Carthage High School—after all, it’s not like the town itself is going anywhere. There will still be a “Carthage high school,” it’ll just have kids in it who grew up a little further down the road than our bus routes traditionally stretched.
I mean, a building is just a building.
That’s how I felt, at least, until my sister and I took the tour.
When we got home to Carthage, we drove south of town to the lonely prairie spot where the old Union Douglas grade school—or “UD” as we called it— still stands. There was a business set up in the gym. The place where I played so many games of freeze tag now houses a car-detailing shop. It was a little surreal.
We made our way through the rest of the building, and I entered my second grade classroom. Even though more than 20 years had gone by, the room looked just as I might’ve imagined it—cinderblock walls, beige-tile floors, dust—and, about everywhere I stepped—dead crickets. I remembered the sticky spring days just before summer break, when grasshoppers used to jump in through the rectangular windows along the east wall.
We went back to town to visit the next building, which stands just off Highway 136 in the middle of town.
For my sister, this building was simply “the junior high”—where she’d attended sixth through eighth grade— but by the time I attended there, it had been changed to “Central Elementary,” a middle school.
Inside that building (which now has some other name), everything was bright and clean, because this one is still actually occupied by grade-schoolers. As we toured the rooms, I marveled at how tiny they were in comparison to my memory. My sister and I took turns photographing each other in front of ridiculously un-remarkable objects. Each hook in a coatroom, warped spot in the floor, or fire-escape door held different meanings for us.
“Get me in front of this pencil sharpener,” I’d say, in the room where I’d spent my sixth grade days. “This is right next to where I sat.”
“No, no, this was the art room when I went here,” she’d say. “Get one of me over here in front of the old art-supply cabinets.”
As we were leaving, an elderly Carthage woman entered the room with her granddaughter, who goes to school in the building now. “ …and this is where I had Home Ec,” she told the girl. “This was the high school back then, you know.”
By the end of the weekend I would realize that even though the convergence in Carthage signals the end of an era, the school district has actually been morphing and shaping all along. And each of us has this stubborn sense of ownership—as if those buildings existed solely for our own time in them. I realized that one of the great frustrations of small-town life—the feeling that nothing ever changes—can also be one of its greatest perks: everywhere you turn, you’re surrounded by tangible pieces of your history. And you’re free to go in and take a tour of them.
The last stop on our building tour was the high school. In the gym, pastel pink and green streamers were strung from the ceiling for that night’s school dance. The podium was prepared for the crowning of the king and queen.
“Here,” I said to my sister, handing her my camera. “Get one of me up here. Look, I’m the queen!”
So now I have proof that things do eventually change in small towns; it just takes time.
daydream believer
