On days when my schedule permitted, I volunteered at my daughter's middle school. The teachers didn't need classroom assistants the way the elementary school teachers did when my wife and I volunteered there. At middle school, the most desperate need was for help during the lunch hour. Crowd control. When I checked in at the front office, I was given a button that in large letters said, "Dads At Lunch." On my first day of volunteering, the receptionist gave me some coupons for a free cheeseburger at the local McDonald's.

"These are if you catch one of the kids being good," she said, as she doled out a few into my hand. Interesting premise, I thought. "Catching" kids being good? I noticed the drawer where the coupons were kept must have had a thousand in there. At the rate she was handing them to me, my grandchildren would be students here before the coupons were used up.



"What do you mean by ‘being good'?" I asked.



"If they speak to you, or if they throw away some trash," she said. "Just don't give coupons to kids with plastic bags who are picking up trash. They are being punished for something." Apparently they already had been caught for doing something other than good.



"Do I have to have a reason to give out one of these coupons?

"

She thought for a moment, and shrugged.



"I guess not."



"Then can I have some more?"



She gave me a pocketful.



I didn't really have any expectations as I approached the lunch area. My daughter had told me that it was mostly loud and messy and offered no counsel other than to not embarrass her. I got there about 10 minutes before the bell rang, so I stood off to the side of this outdoor concrete slab with metal picnic tables covered by a patio roof, waiting for the kids to arrive. About 50 crows and gulls also had gotten there early, but took their places patiently on the roof so they could see where their best chances would be for their own lunch in about 45 minutes. It was a type of ornithological security camera. They jockeyed for position with one another as I assumed the kids would do once the cafeteria windows were open for business.



What I didn't anticipate was how my own memories of school lunches came flooding back, nearly causing an out-of-body experience.



There have been times in my life when I intentionally have gone back to specific places in my past just to stand in their midst and see if any ghosts were still there. I have sat in my elementary school parking lot remembering a teacher drawing blood out of my chin with her thumbnail for my misbehaving. I have walked through the rink where I got my teeth knocked out playing hockey, and have tarried at the spot on the way home from junior high school where I lost a fight. I have gone to the senior room of my high school where I was terrorized as a freshman and later terrorized freshmen three years later. I have gone to graves of friends who have left us too early, and have stood in the Library of Congress where I did my dissertation research, just to see if there were any ghosts lingering there. Names, mostly good memories, but no ghosts.