Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 5

There is a building not far from your home.  A squatty, ugly building.  Expansive.  Long.  But small, in the eyes of the world.  Of little historical consequence.  It will have no historian.  No lengthy narration.  No bound and shelved chronicle.  Someday, it will be torn down and built anew.  After which it will exist in the memories of those who were unlucky enough to have passed through it, until the bodies that hold those memories are eaten by worms or shut up in a furnace.  It is a building that haunts folks no matter how far they run from it.  No matter how many years they put between themselves and it.  A building that does as much to shape a kid as a rigid church, a broken home, a drunken father.

 

It is a building composed in the main of bricks and mortar.  But in truth, built on the strange shifting tides of adolescent years.  A building where children are forced to inter their childhoods, and try on the strange, starchy, and ill-fitting funeration clothing of adulthood.  A burial ground for song, dance, and invisible friends.  A corner of the country where Americans lose the faith, in the religion of being children. 

 

Which means an ill-lit corner of Stray Country.

 

And would you believe there is a man who chose this building as his place of employment?  He's called a janitor.  And he's the man who mops up the molt of kids' childhood shells.  After hours.  Alone.  By himself.  Perhaps looking . . . perhaps, wondering . . . just where he misplaced his own childhood.