At the far end of the stem of the inverted “T-shape” that was my high school, under the West Cafeteria, was a double-sized classroom full of drafting tables, where I took Mechanical Drawing, with the best group of friends and classmates Colonie Central High had to offer. I took four years of drawing and drafting in high-school, which even included a fancy new Computer Aided Design module as a senior in 1988, which was pretty high-tech at the time. 

Mr. Vanamerongen (who always told people to call him “Mr. Van” for the obvious reason) was the high-priest of the room, and his students were devoted to him. He was kind and quiet, and firm and fatherly in the way the best career teachers are. He was one of those men who understood that the course material might fade, but the skills he taught us, on the page and off, could be permanent. He usually had a coffee mug in one hand as he’d pass  through the room looking over our shoulders, quietly correcting our mistakes. 

I can close my eyes and look around the room and see where everyone in the class sat. It can’t really be that everyone sat in the same spot for three or four years, but I can’t picture Rick or Ralph, Russ or Margaret, Dan or James, Mike or Joe at any other desk than “their own” in my memory. I wish I could remember who else was in the room.

As I think on it, the most palpable thing in that room was the quiet. Not silence, not the absence of noise or action. Quiet. There must have been days at a time when a dozen or so teenagers could spend forty-five minutes in focused effort, heads near a large page of paper, pencil in one hand, three-sided ruler in another. From here I see the haven that it was during the noisy hormone driven day. 

My mother credits MechDrawing (MechDraw? – we had some “cool” abbreviation) as the only reason my handwriting is even remotely legible, and she’s probably correct. Learning to patiently trace letters and numbers, even with a stencil took all the concentration I could muster. We learned to make blueprints for machines, parts, even houses by the end. We broke increasingly complex objects down into component parts and views, learning how different something could appear from the front, top, or sides. I struggled for the entire time to capture the strange way even the simplest curves warp in your eyes and on the page as you change the location of your eyes to pin them down.