Pretty much everybody in our little town in Canada has connections to the US, and a significant number of High School graduates go “down to the States” for college. In order to do that, Canadian students prepare for and take the ACT exam that is required for most American schools. Since so many kids from Cardston take it, our High School is a regional hub for the test. Even kids from larger city centers had to travel to our tiny town for the test.

This is how one of those testing sessions went.

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Junior High has one more important story to tell. For gym class, Mr. Hogan loaded us in the bus and drove us out to Lion’s Park. The schools of our small town share one football field and good track that is close to the High School. For the next few days, we’d be coming down here to practice funny jumps into piles of sand and belly-flopping huge mattresses.

The guys and I were too cool for that. We asked Mr. Hogan if we could do our own thing as long as we stayed in the park. He grunted something about “free country” and “failure at life” but we took that as an answer in the affirmative.

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Gym class was really fun in Jr. High. We played tons of different sports throughout the year, so it didn’t get boring and those of us (such as Yours Truly) who weren’t that great at the whole “sports” thing could get a chance to at least find SOME kind of physical activity that we could not suck at.

Unfortunately for me, the one sport I was “good” at was javelin. It’s probably a risk to even call javelin a sport, it’s just one of those activities that is lumped together with like 25 other activities and called “Track & Field.” In fact, javelin was so “not a sport” that our gym teacher, Mr. Hogan (name changed, duh), only devoted about 20 minutes to having us line up outside and throw the thing out to the field.

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My High School experience was pretty awesome. I find that a lot of people really hated their High School years, and that is unfortunate to me because when I think of the most fun I’ve ever had, it always goes back to my group of best friends that I had in High School.  I should say the good times began a little earlier, but it wasn’t until High School that we really clicked and got super cheesy (and probably super caffeinated really late at night) and named our small posse, “The Blood Brothers.”

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