Once again we travel down memory lane. This will be much shorter because photos I wanted to show had cloud cover. My mother’s house was completely covered by a thick cloud. It covered several houses. Sometimes Google’s photos aren’t that great. They also aren’t updated very often. I looked up my present house, and it identifies the wrong house. Also the photo is from over a year ago because there’s a tree in the photo that isn’t there anymore. That tree fell over last winter in high winds. So today I give you my high school.

gish

See the long buildings fanning out? The high school has these long wings. No second stories when I was there. In between the wings are little grassy areas. Nice to look at, but you couldn’t go there. The school had tons of windows. It would be a perfect school for California, but it was terribly cold in the winter. I suppose the teachers thought the windows were a distraction as well. If class was boring, you could easily stare out the window and watch the weather or birds. The wings were painted different colors. So there was a yellow wing, a green wing and a blue wing. We referred to them that way. The lunch room was in the area with the white roof. With only five minutes between classes, if you had to get from lunch to the yellow wing (the third one), you had to run! The school has changed quite a bit with large additions that weren’t there when I was there. The large building near the parking lot wasn’t there. That was the parking lot. The smaller addition with the dark roof wasn’t there either. I think that’s the gym. The track and field has always been there.

One interesting thing about this school is that not only did I go there, so did my grandfather, my grandmother, their family members, my uncle, my mother, my cousins, my mother’s cousins, and my sister. The class photos are posted in the hallways. I could pick out my relatives as I walked down the hallway. The school was new when my mother went there. It was a smaller building when my grandmother and grandfather went.

When I look at the photo, the one thing I remember is running around that track for P.E. Those mile runs we had to do and get graded on. It was never a problem for me to finish in the time for an A. I can’t say that about the rest of P.E. It wasn’t one of my strengths.

The best thing about looking at this photo is that I don’t have the reaction to it that I had to high school itself. High school completely sucked. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. The cliques. The snobbery. My last year as the senior section editor of the yearbook I made sure that everyone got into the yearbook–either pictures or quotes in the stories I wrote. I spoke to everyone. I got to know everyone. Anyway, I survived. My high school teachers did one good thing–they prepared me for college. College was a repeat of high school for nearly the first two years. Freshman year of college was easy. So next, it’s onto college.