(I wrote this piece in 1983, for Historic Preservation, and I’ve always felt warmly about it. Recently I was reading Kent Haruf’s glorious novel Benediction, and lo, he mentions a windowhook. So I thought, let’s bring it back. Older readers will know right away what I’m talking about. The younger guys will figure it out.)
WINDOWHOOK
There are certain words that, uttered, sing like struck tuning forks: the old school words. Skatekey. Pencilcase. Lunchbox. Dodgeball. Tradingcards. Chalkrail. These compounds evoke their denoted objects with such celerity, specificity, and clarity that we may be nearly run over, unable to get out of their way. Librarybook: thick bindings of bright red (or perhaps blue), white block lettering on the spine, pages soft and slightly yellowed and fingerworn about the corners. Remember? Out of such lumber we build images of our past. Windowhook.
A windowhook is a pole with a fitting attached to one end, used to open and close a window. Although the word appears in neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor Webster’s Third New International (nor nowadays, I find, on Dictionary.com), I can describe the object precisely. It is perfect in my memory. The pole is ash, worn smooth and stained by thirty years of third-grade hands; the fitting is brass, tarnished a rich brown save for the buttonlike appendage on the side, which is burnished bright by frequent clumsy contact with the brass receptacle built into each sash. At school, I learned great respect for windowhooks.
Few third-, fourth-, or fifth-graders were capable of operating one. Fewer still were ever given the chance. A child weak in eye or hand could inadvertently turn the process of window adjustment into burlesque; a class clown could bring down the house for the rest of arithmetic and all of geography. My teachers were all without sense of humor when it came to the windowhook, and the privilege of using it generally fell to coordinated toadies, like me.
I attended two elementary schools in Portland, Maine – McLellan, eight rooms, kindergarten through fourth grade, built during the administration of Grover Cleveland; and Butler, three blocks away, somewhat larger with an auditorium, grades five and six, built somewhat earlier in the ebb of the term of Rutherford B. Hayes. Both buildings were constructed of deep russet bricks and held two floors of classrooms. In the mid-fifties I spent two years in each school and thus came to know four rooms intimately: paths worn gray in the hardwood floors, hardwood desks with inkwells cut through to ink-splashed interiors, slate blackboards overhung (in each classroom) with Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington, ceilings at least sixteen feet high, with great tall windows. A DC-3 could have flown through any one of those windows. At the back, hanging from a brass receptacle screwed to the wall, was the windowhook.
“Would someone close the window, please?” An armload of hands would go up. “Ah – yes, John?” And the inexpressible pride, the power, and the glory! To know at the age of nine, the ecstasy Cotton Mather experienced among the elect! To use the windowhook!
Favored children in the west end of Portland are no longer rewarded by being allowed to push a window sash up or down with a pole. An obvious reason (but probably not the only one) is that in the 1970s the Howard Reiche Elementary School came into being, rendering obsolete the McLellan and Butler Schools – and with them, their classroom windowhooks. The Howard Reiche Elementary School is nice enough in its way – low to the ground, brick and concrete, sprawling – but it has small windows. Anybody could open them.
On this day in 1983, I am stopping back in Portland to see what – if anything – remains of my two old schools. I have driven past the Howard Reiche Elementary School on Brackett Street. I find Butler right where I left it more than twenty-five years ago, facing Andrews Square and the Pine Street Garage, nestled in the fork of Pine and West Streets. It has become a federal housing project. Forty-two apartments for the elderly have been tucked inside it, neat as toys in a stocking. I can see from the outside how the renovators have created so many units. They have shuffled in a new floor. Where there once were two levels of classroom windows, I am staring at three tiers of smaller apartment ones. Otherwise the building looks much as I remember it, a sort of huge brick Ark come to postdiluvian rest. I look up at the carved sandstone plaque: “Butler School – 1879.”
A white-haired woman comes out of the building, notices me, and approaches doubtfully. “Can I help you?”
I explain.
“Oh. One of the old students? Well, we certainly like living in your old school.” She smiles.
Over at the corner of Neil and Carroll Streets I rediscover McLellan. Although it is empty, the building itself looks scrubbed. The bricks arching over its entrance are bright in the afternoon sun. Small patches of new lawn are snuggled up to its base. Young trees have been planted in its newly rebricked sidewalk. In the back, where once lay the asphalt playground, stands a row of new brick garages. From the side of the building a sign faces Carroll Street: “12 Condominium Homes – McLellan School Houses.”
I stand on the sidewalk, looking through the tall windows into the unoccupied rooms, and through them into my past. And I am thinking to myself – I swear it – windowhook. Windowhook.
©1983
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