Ghosts from the past
Literally.
What is a ghost? Does anybody really know? Are they actually trapped or side tracked spirits? Are they remnants of memories of the deceased? Are they place memory, if such a thing exists? Are they apparitions or illusions created by memories and/or wishes of the loved ones left behind? There are so many questions one could ask related to this topic, and all for me were once just simply curiousity. They still are, but now the curiosity wants an answer, even though I know there really isn't one to be given. Until recently hauntings and apparitions were from the long past, King Henry the VIII past, or perhaps more recent, but not from my past.
A few days ago I found out that the high school I attended so long ago is haunted. The apparitions, the ghosts, are my classmates from a little over 30 years ago. Friends and events I had thought long forgotten suddenly flooded into my head and brought tears to my eyes. I find myself missing my best friend who didn't live to see his sixteenth birthday, though he made certain he made it to mine. I miss Danny. And I miss the 27 others who died with him suddenly and unexpectedly on that 24th day in May 1976. And I am somehow saddened to hear that the auditorium, stage and music rooms are haunted by their presence. Something about that knowledge pains me more than attending all those funerals and burials did back then.
I wanted to do something to remember all those friends from so long ago. I wanted to list them by name and to reprint some of the photos, their school photos from that year, and the articles. The photos may still be buried in my parents garage, if they weren't destroyed by renters or flood. I don't have access to check at the moment. The articles are mostly buried in pre-internet newspaper archives and are not easily accessible. But I did find one Newsweek article. They covered a few of the funerals, they mentioned Danny--he's the organ donor-- and they called us a luckless city. Maybe they were right. So many bright futures snuffed out so quickly. But maybe they were wrong, because so many more of the young lives of this town were thrown into the lime light and pushed to their limits as they fought for the right to have the bright futures they might otherwise never have realized had a challenge not been placed in their path.
We fought for the right to have a chior again. When we had that we fought, and rehearsed morning, evening and weekends, not to mention during class,to become an award winning chior and be allowed to compete again. And during my senior year 1977-78 we won that right from our parents, the school and the school board, so long as we didn't take a bus. We won every competition we attended that year and paved the way for the next years chior to do the same. And during those two years, my junior and senior year, following what was then the worst school bus accident in US history, I sang at more memorial services than I ever want to remember. The melody for Locus Iste still floats through my mind during sad times, though I remember only a few of the words. Locus Iste a Deo Factus est, Inestimabile sacramentum, Irreprehensibilis est...(This place was made by God,A sacred thing beyond price,and without blemish...).
If you've recently seen the movie We Are Marshall, you will get a small flavour for what our town, our school, our chior went through after that accident. You can never fully understand, fully feel the effects, if you haven't experienced a tragedy of that impact yourself, but you can empathize. The pain, fear, reactions, fight that that town and university went through is the same as what Yuba City and Yuba City High School went through. It is a movie worth seeing.
What is a ghost? Does anybody really know? Are they actually trapped or side tracked spirits? Are they remnants of memories of the deceased? Are they place memory, if such a thing exists? Are they apparitions or illusions created by memories and/or wishes of the loved ones left behind? There are so many questions one could ask related to this topic, and all for me were once just simply curiousity. They still are, but now the curiosity wants an answer, even though I know there really isn't one to be given. Until recently hauntings and apparitions were from the long past, King Henry the VIII past, or perhaps more recent, but not from my past.
A few days ago I found out that the high school I attended so long ago is haunted. The apparitions, the ghosts, are my classmates from a little over 30 years ago. Friends and events I had thought long forgotten suddenly flooded into my head and brought tears to my eyes. I find myself missing my best friend who didn't live to see his sixteenth birthday, though he made certain he made it to mine. I miss Danny. And I miss the 27 others who died with him suddenly and unexpectedly on that 24th day in May 1976. And I am somehow saddened to hear that the auditorium, stage and music rooms are haunted by their presence. Something about that knowledge pains me more than attending all those funerals and burials did back then.
I wanted to do something to remember all those friends from so long ago. I wanted to list them by name and to reprint some of the photos, their school photos from that year, and the articles. The photos may still be buried in my parents garage, if they weren't destroyed by renters or flood. I don't have access to check at the moment. The articles are mostly buried in pre-internet newspaper archives and are not easily accessible. But I did find one Newsweek article. They covered a few of the funerals, they mentioned Danny--he's the organ donor-- and they called us a luckless city. Maybe they were right. So many bright futures snuffed out so quickly. But maybe they were wrong, because so many more of the young lives of this town were thrown into the lime light and pushed to their limits as they fought for the right to have the bright futures they might otherwise never have realized had a challenge not been placed in their path.
We fought for the right to have a chior again. When we had that we fought, and rehearsed morning, evening and weekends, not to mention during class,to become an award winning chior and be allowed to compete again. And during my senior year 1977-78 we won that right from our parents, the school and the school board, so long as we didn't take a bus. We won every competition we attended that year and paved the way for the next years chior to do the same. And during those two years, my junior and senior year, following what was then the worst school bus accident in US history, I sang at more memorial services than I ever want to remember. The melody for Locus Iste still floats through my mind during sad times, though I remember only a few of the words. Locus Iste a Deo Factus est, Inestimabile sacramentum, Irreprehensibilis est...(This place was made by God,A sacred thing beyond price,and without blemish...).
If you've recently seen the movie We Are Marshall, you will get a small flavour for what our town, our school, our chior went through after that accident. You can never fully understand, fully feel the effects, if you haven't experienced a tragedy of that impact yourself, but you can empathize. The pain, fear, reactions, fight that that town and university went through is the same as what Yuba City and Yuba City High School went through. It is a movie worth seeing.
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