The Goodbye Brick

Noel and I just returned from 15 days and our last teach-a-thon at The Guild School in Castine, Me, and our last class ever. The School and Castine were their usual lovely selves and difficult to say goodbye to. I am hoping some of you will email me photos for future postings about the school. We thank everyone in attendance for their good wishes, the wonderful flowers that graced our as-always messy classroom, the keepsake album, and best of all, our very own brick, signed in gold by the ever-ready Tool Pool! Special thanks go to Pete and Pam Boorum for packing and shipping up both the album and The Brick. We are in your debt…

Flowers in the classroom

The Tool Pool (currently composed of the Boorums, Dick & Carol Hardy, and Elizabeth Gazmuri) is a stellar group that purchases, repairs, oversees and stores untold numbers of tools and appliances for the Guild classrooms—metal and woodworking lathes, shapers, planers, drills, kilns, dryers, etc., along with the accompanying heavy-duty orange extension cords, clamps, chucks, bits and plastic buckets. They’re a volunteer staff who make sure everything is tip-top and delivered to the right classrooms each June. And each June they present, in vain, an amusing little skit for the faculty on how to re-coil the heavy-duty orange extension cords so that they aren’t in a snarl for next year. Then they stay after school to pack it all up, re-coil the extension cords and run inventory. In the dead of winter they return to Maine for cleaning, repairs, replacements and to make sure the Academy hasn’t stashed them somewhere where they won’t be found again in June. And all this is in addition to their duties as teachers and students.

Midnight Brick Supply: Maine Maritime Student Center

The Brick was one of 12 we used as classroom weights and props for most of our twenty-eight years at the school. They also happened to be borrowed from an Academy (Maine Maritime, where the school takes place) building project, as replacements for the rocks we’d formerly gathered from a nearby beach and returned at the end of each school session. When we decided to box and store them, the bricks became bones of contention with a few individuals in charge (present leadership not included), not to mention The Tool Pool, charged with hauling them around for us. Once we proved they were actual tools–necessary for our students–the irritation turned to good-natured (we imagine) ribbing as to the primitive nature of our “tools.” Nonetheless, they remained gritty, scruffy, duct-tape-wrapped boxes of dead weight. But, hey, who’s to say a brick is lower in stature than a toaster oven? Or a heavy-duty orange extension cord.

The brick now joins other more glamorous awards and acknowledgements on our mantel, and we send special thanks to all of you who have toiled for so many years to keep us in bricks, buckets and band-aids. Considering that someone paid $90.00 for one of the bricks at auction, we know how highly you value us…