My mother worked at the Catholic school that my siblings and I attended for nine years. Once school was over and the building emptied, I'd happily roam the emptiness while my brother stayed with my mother in her classroom to draw. Having been bullied by classmates, it was such a relief to exist in the building with only a few teachers and nuns, who were leaving and putting themselves away for the day. The nuns still lived in a portion of the school. Their living quarters would shrink each year. As we waited for my father to pick us up, I would open the classroom doors, walk up and down the aisles of school desks, look at the bulletin boards, look out the windows, and open closet doors. I loved the large, brass door knobs. They were much larger than any I had seen in my lifetime. They had to be to open such heavy doors. The doors were solid wood with several layers of paint that seemed to add extra weight to them.  It was this sort of exploring, one afternoon, that brought me to thi...