Happy Anniverary!

Somewhere near the end of August it will be 40 years since we entered high school. Can you believe it? Forty years. I can remember being both excited and nervous about it. I liked the idea of going to a brand new school, but I had also heard all the horror stories from my older brothers and friends of the things that happened during freshman "initiation".

I can still see the throng of people standing outside the front doors when I walked up. They were stacked almost back to the sidewalks along Highway 11, and school buses were dropping off more. Most of the faces were unfamiliar and that only added to my anxiety. Everyone seemed to be clustered into little groups, no doubt as moral support for each other, so I tried to find a little group of my own. I ended up with Wayne McNabb, Pat Lowe, Jabbo Lynn and Steve Knox. I had known Wayne and Pat for years, and all of us were incoming freshmen, and that served as a bond of sorts.

After that, it's a blur of finding out where we were supposed to be, getting assigned lockers and learning the combination, and learning our schedule and where the classrooms were; along with who was teaching it, and were they easy or strict. I think for the first couple of weeks, if I wasn't in class (or outside smoking), I was hanging around the big foyer near the front doors. I knew where everything was from there and sort of used it as a home base. After that time though, I was only in the foyer when I was going someplace since that's where the office was.

Next came learning who everybody else was, or at least the ones you had classes with, and slowly but surely the anxiety started to ease up and things began to calm down a bit and you could relax. Good thing too, because by then the classes were all going full swing and you actually had to study something.

After a month or so, it was almost like I had always known everybody. It was fun finding out things about the kids from the other grade schools like Philadelphia, Steekee, Davis and Jackson, and discovering that in a lot of ways, we were all alike. You found out who was a clown and who was serious, and who were the "smart" kids and which ones were nearer my level. :) I discovered I had "talents" of sorts. My bird whistle echoed perfectly in the library and study hall, I could make a new friend or two drawing pictures in science (and later biology), and since my handwriting looked "like a girl's", I could write excuses for my friends a few times when they forgot to bring one from home for whatever reason.

All in all they're some of my favorite memories.