Sibling Assignment #84: Silver King Silver Bells

InlandEmpireGirl decided to get us siblings thinking about Christmas songs and gave us this assignment:

When we hear certain songs they take us back to a time and place in our past and stir up memories. Pick a Christmas song and reflect on the time and place it takes you.

InlandEmpireGirl recalls "White Christmas, here and Silver Valley Girl remembers "A Christmas Song" here.

If someone had had a documentary film camera at the Silver King gymnasium in December, 1960, I don't know if the celluloid footage would be very much like the movie, shot that night, that has played in my mind over the last forty years.

I know a few things. About a year and a half I wrote, here, about playing Santa Claus in the 1960 pageant. I know our family ate at the Sunshine Inn before the pageant. I know that we all got paper bags with hard candy. I know the Christmas program was in the Silver King Elementary School gymnasium. I know Ron Jacobs and I drove up to Silver King this past September and the school's been razed and removed.

But, what I'm writing next might have never happened in the concrete world.

But, in my emotional memory, it happened.

After our part of the program, we first graders sat in the audience on the gym floor and watched the other grades perform.

I remember the third graders singing "Silver Bells". I fell into a private rapture. It might have been my first ever experience with the power of beauty. When the third graders sang the words "Silver Bells", the girls answered "Silver Bells" with the wordless response that is so familiar.

I heard the girls sing this response and, as I my whole body was suddenly overwhelmed with joy and my six year old insides quivered, then shook. I didn't cry, but I felt like crying. I was stifling the tears of being carried away by what I experienced as the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard.

I felt something like pure love. I had my first experience with the way girls made me feel different. I felt attracted to the third grade girls, not because of what they looked like, but because "Silver Bells" sounded so beautiful. I remember seeing beauty in all their faces.

Three Beautiful Things 03/31/07: Valley Tour, Belly Laughs, Poker

1. Touring the Silver Valley today with Mom, Silver Valley Girl and InlandEmpireGirl: among other things, we drove to Elizabeth Park, Moon Gulch, Terror Gulch, up Canyon Creek to Gem and Burke (and all points before and in between and after), ate lunch at the 1313 Tavern, drove past Silver King Elementary school and looked at the remains of the Zinc Plant, and toured Smelterville.

2. My sisters and I laughed hysterically when we said that the electric garage door at Silver Valley Girl's house could be opened by saying "Paul Riep" and closed by saying "Marcella". We are the only three living human beings who get that joke.

3. Ron, Ed, and I drove to Coeur d'Alene and met up with Bruce and Scott and played poker for five and half hours or so in Scott's boat. What happens on Scott's boat, well, wouldn't be understood outside Scott's boat! Pictures forthcoming.

Silver King School: Undefeated! Assignment #15

The next assignment for my sisters and me to work on is something we remember happening at Silver King Elementary School, where our mother taught for many years. InlandEmpireGirl's essay is here. Silver Valley Girl's is still to come. For once, I'm not the last one done!!

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Silver King Elementary school epitomizes either the heartlessness, naivete, obliviousness, or ignorance of the Industrial Revolution. The school sat about a quarter of a mile below the Zinc Plant. The creek running along the east side of the school, right by the playground, carried sulphuric acid and other zinc smelting waste to the Coeur d'Alene River. The Bunker Hill Lead Smelter was just over a small hill from Silver King school. It was as if the founding fathers of the Industrial Age gave no thought at all to whether the emissions from these plants might be harmful to children or to the teachers who taught at this school.

It's funny, though. I went to Silver King for two years. Those two years were like my Fern Hill, the eden of Dylan Thomas' poetic memory. I loved Silver King's long halls with fat round posts in the middle, the ramp that went down to the lunch room and how fun it was to slide down, the big window at the south end of the hall and the colored glass bottles that decorated it; I loved the tiny library where I sat one day while Mom worked in her school room reading "Horton Hears a Who" and where another day I found a 78 rpm recording of "Rhapsody in Blue" recorded at a much quicker tempo than our Bernstein conducted version at home and where another day I found leftover bags of the hard candy Santa Claus distributed at the Christmas pageant.

By far, however, my favorite place in Silver King school was the gymnasium. I might have this wrong, but memory tells me that Silver King was built in two stages and the gym was in the new part of the school.

The floor was beautifully maintained, shiny, tan, almost slick. My best times in that gym were when Mom had to work on her room and she secured the key to the equipment room and let me, by myself, or me with a friend, shoot baskets while she worked.

When I was in junior high, especially, I had high hopes of being a good basketball player. I was a kid who got tall pretty fast, so that by the ninth grade, I was almost six feet tall and well-coordinated.

I loved to shoot. I read stories about players like Bill Bradley who shot audacious numbers of jump shots each day. I didn't shoot these high numbers each day, but at the Silver King gym, whether I was was alone or with Roger or with Terry or anyone else, I'd shoot and shoot and shoot; I'd run from end to end of the floor, running one man fast breaks and pull up for uncontested seventeen foot jumpers. If with a friend, we'd play HORSE. We'd invent shots. We'd try stuff out.

I watched as much NBA basketball as was broadcast in the middle to late sixties. We saw a game a week and then the all-star game and pieces of the playoffs. I loved to imitate shooters: Oscar Robertson, Sam Jones, Earl Monroe, Walt Frazier, Rick Barry, even Bailey Howell. I'd pick up on little habits they had or how they cradled the ball at the free throw line or how they squared themselves to the basket and I'd be those players.

It was a great escape. I created endless scenarios of games tied and me hitting final shots and free throws and beating the clock with a steal at midcourt and scoring a cripple just before the buzzer sounded.

I went undefeated at Silver King gym.

No wonder I loved it so much!