My Hero
Tuesday, November 9, 1965 – 5:27 p.m.
I was focused on the drawing before me. It was a pencil drawing with neatly ruled lines and spaces, and the emphasis that day was perspective. I was drawing what would be akin to a diorama-like rendition of a room, presumably in a home, and the horizontal lines where the rear wall met the floor and ceiling were straight and perfectly parallel. The side walls provided a sense of depth with appropriate angles carefully drawn. It was a class in interior design, a very pleasant way to end a long and intense academic school day of geometry, economics, literature, biology, and advanced Spanish.
At about 5:25 the lights dimmed and then flickered off and on again. Just seconds later it happened again. The third time, however, the lights went off and stayed off. Sunset was at 4:43 p.m. that day, almost an hour before. The class was silent, remaining seated in total darkness. It quickly became apparent that the lights might not be coming on any time soon and with only minutes to when the end-of-period bell would have rung, the bustle of collecting our things and making our way out of the classroom began.
The classroom was on the third floor on the Glenwood Road side of the building. I inched along the corridor wall knowing that the next set of doors to my right led to the stairwell. I had to go upstairs first, however, to my fourth floor homeroom where my locker housed my olive green, wool, double-breasted peacoat. The halls and stairwells were crowded with students moving slowly and haphazardly this way and that. Every so often, a match was struck somewhere and flickered briefly. There was no plan, only confusion.
I followed the crowd to the fourth floor and my homeroom was just to the right. I made my way through the mostly motionless throng of students to my locker along the back wall. Fortunately I always left the combination lock on my locker set to the second of three right-left-right numbers so that all I had to do was slowly rotate the dial to the right until the last number clicked into place and the lock fell open. It was a timesaver for me, not a good practice for keeping my things safe and protected. On that day, that worked in my favor.
I grabbed my coat and walked over to the wall of windows that could just barely be detected by a faint light from outside. I needed to look out onto the street to assess the situation and come up with a plan. To my delight, the row of slow-moving cars along Bedford Avenue at the corner provided lots of light from their bright headlights and blinking red taillights. Okay. Getting home would not be a problem. Getting out of the building was a different story.
As I stood at the window dazzled by car lights, I suddenly became aware that my mother was standing next to me. My mother? How could that be? Here I was on the fourth floor of a pitch dark high school, a four-story building that occupied an entire city block, next to my mother who I am 100% certain had no idea where I would be within that building or if I were even in that building at that time. My father had picked my mother up from her work and they were driving home and just blocks from my high school when they saw the lights of the city go out. Somehow they knew they had to get to me, even if they didn’t know what that meant. So she was there, my mother, and she had no other explanation for how or why. In the midst of all the chaos, all the darkness, all the unknowns, there was my mother beaming with joy!
My mother and I slowly made our way back to the staircase and then down a flight of stairs to the third floor. A thin beam of light bounced off a stairway window and as we descended further, the stairway became more and more visible. By the second floor, the stairwell was well lit – not like daylight but like a bright light shining in and lighting the way. When I reached the exit moments later it became clear that bright light came from a car, a car that was deliberately positioned on the sidewalk with its high beams shining up the staircase. That shining light stayed in place until the building was empty, until every person was safely out of the building.
My mother and I approached that car and climbed in. Behind the wheel was my hero: My Dad.
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