Hello friends. Today I’m going to get into the high school years. High school, a time we all remember fondly…or something like that. Good times, bad times, and just ok times. But we can’t argue that high school may have been the single most important time in forming who we would eventually become.
The summer before my Freshman year, I worked out at the Green Lake Conference Center at the Hotel as a Dining Room Orderly and dishwasher. They served food cafeteria style, so as a DRO, my job was to bring the food in the warming cabinets down from the kitchen to the dining room as well as bring the empty pans back up. Plus, stock all the beverage dispensers, ice cream, cereal containers, plate carts, silverware stands, and general cleanup after meals. Grunt work, but I was fourteen, what else is there at that age. Once school started, I was done out there for the season, but I still helped my Dad on his side jobs on the weekends.
Freshman year was a pretty good one. I had lockers next to one of my good friends, and I knew some of the upper classmen from early football practices, so that helped a little. Almost all my classes were on the same side of the school which kept late to class detentions to a minimum. We also started a tradition. A couple of my friends, including one of my best friends who lived near by me, would walk to school together. When we got there, we’d drop our stuff at our lockers and just walk laps around the halls talking stupid and saying hi to our other friends. It doesn’t seem like much, but you’ll learn in a later post just how awesome that was.
I was far from the model student, and I may have had acquired a detention or ten here or there, but hey, I showed up most days. And that’s something, right? I had a knack for making teachers a bit upset with me because I wouldn’t do the homework most of the time, but consistently got As and Bs on the tests. I understood the stuff, I was just a bit lazy. I heard that “if you would only apply yourself” speech so many times I should have gotten it tattooed on my chest. I was even accused of cheating by the biology teacher once, so I told him to give me another test and I’d sit alone in the room with him watching the whole time I took the test. I ended up getting a better grade on the second test.
Shop class got a whole lot better. We got to start welding. I enjoyed this immensely, except for maybe that day a classmate set himself on fire with the torch and proceeded to yell, “I’m on fire, I’m on fire” while trying to put himself out with the hand that was still holding the lit torch. We did finally get him to drop the torch so we could put his arm out. He suffered very minor injuries, but we were done welding for the day.
How many of you remember the trick of jamming two pennies into the bottom of your locker door so it wouldn’t lock? I couldn’t remember the combination to save my soul, so I did that on week two and it stayed like that almost the whole four years. Almost. One morning during second semester, I came in to see my locker partner standing by the locker with his backpack in his hand. He said someone had taken the pennies out and he couldn’t remember the combination. I couldn’t either, but lucky for both of us, I had scratched the combination into the metal above a locker three lockers away from us. I know, destruction of school property, blah blah blah. But smart. Wasn’t above our locker, so we wouldn’t get blamed for it, and it saved us that day.
I wasn’t much for study hall. I usually just sat there listening to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning on my Walkman (Walkman is a registered trademark of the Sony corporation, I don’t know if they’ll see this, but better safe than sued) the whole time. I found out a good way to waste time was to volunteer to pick up attendance sheets. At a normal pace, this would take maybe ten minutes to complete. Our school wasn’t that big. You just had to grab them off the door and drop them in the office. I managed to make this task take forty-five minutes. Now that’s talent. I also knew which classes my friends were in so I could slowly walk by the door making faces or gestures to make them laugh. I only got in trouble a few times for that. One of the English teachers stopped me one day as she had witnessed my sluggish retrieval of said sheets. She proceeded to tell me how much potential I had, and that she really loved my imaginative stories I came up with for my writing assignments. I blew it off like most speeches I got back then, but in hindsight, it was really nice of her to say.
I had two after school activities. The first was football. Football was fun because you get to hit people and not get in trouble for it. I liked defense better than offense because there seemed to be less rules and less plays to remember. I wasn’t the best at it, but I enjoyed playing until a knee injury my Sophomore year put a damper on things. I’m sure I would have lost interest in it anyway because most of my friends stopped playing after Freshman year.
The second was weight club. This one I enjoyed even more. Mostly because if you start lifting weights in your early teens, your strength gains are quite rapid. Plus, we got to go on a river rafting trip. Most of this trip was like tubing. Tying off with each other and drifting, although the Freshmen were in charge of keeping the raft city off the banks. Towards the end there was a stretch of rapids and my partner and friend fell out of our raft almost at the start. He rode the rapids down with one arm over the front of the raft and the paddle in the other hand while I tried my best to steer away from the rocks. I can’t remember if he broke anything, I don’t think he did, but he was pretty bruised and scraped up after.
Speaking of football, sometimes when it rained, Coach would have us run laps in the halls. A certain janitor, who lived across the street from me and had two lovely daughters (I don’t know if either of them read this, but if they do, brownie points for me,) used to give us grief when we did. It was a friendly back and forth with him. One time I grabbed his garbage can on wheels and took it with me for a lap. Hey, at least I didn’t leave it in the opposite hall. Of course, then he tried to trip me with his dry mop the next time around. He was my favorite janitor.
Let me tell you a little story about Freshman Algebra. I was always a fan of Math. I even took four years of it in High School including the ones where you had to write out proof of how you came up with your answer. But myself and the teacher of Freshman Algebra did not see eye to eye on things at all. First thing we didn’t agree on was me sitting next to my close friend in the back of the room. Something about disrupting those who were actually there to learn something. We also didn’t agree on me being the one who had to move to the front seat. She also didn’t like me doing the homework she hadn’t assigned yet. I picked up on the basic concepts of Algebra quite quickly, so while she was teaching the next chapter, I was doing the problems at the end of it. This apparently was “not the way we do things here.” Let’s just say the time spent with her was very unpleasant and may have netted me a good chunk of my first year detentions.
Oh man I just loved school dances. Ya, I don’t believe me either. So, I went to some winter dance in the cafeteria because a few of my friends said they were going. After opening the windows, reaching down, and bringing snowballs in to throw, we were asked very politely to never come to any more school dances. I was happy to oblige. Less pressure for me to try and find a girl that would actually say yes without having a full-blown panic attack in the process. I believe my friends ended up going to at least one of our proms, but I think they were drunk when they did.
Well my mind isn’t coming up with anything more to talk about this week, and it’s past my bedtime. I know because the dogs are giving me “the look.” So, I’ll close this week out and we’ll start next week with the summer before Sophomore year. The year of living away from home for a few months and starting to drive legally, for a little while at least.
Until next time, we’re all in this together. Luv Luv.