Ichabod Crane School was always closed. No one knew where Ichabod Crane School was but it was always, always, closed. And we would curse the world’s luckiest kids who went there, who seemed to live in a perpetually snow-drifted place.
Close listening to the radio announcer on snowy mornings: Ichabod Crane School is CLOSED, he would say. It preceded our school district in alphabetical order, so we still had a modicum of hope, proof that the closure of a school was a possibility. But because Ichabod Crane School was always shut, this news was not a harbinger of a snow day - not the same as if the next-door school district was shut, which made us confident that we could creep back to bed.
Ichabod Crane School was closed, we’d grumble as we sloughed off our coats and mittens in front of our lockers (we never wore hats because hats were Not Cool, even though it meant that our heads were Very Extremely Cold). Fucking Ichabod Crane, we said, trundling off to the classes we’d not done the homework for.
I graduated. I went to university. And one day I met a guy there who said he was from upstate New York.
Me too, I said. Where’d you go to high school?
Ichabod Crane School, he said.
ICHABOD CRANE SCHOOL! I said. How did you get into university? ISN’T IT ALWAYS CLOSED?
He blinked.
