This friend, undoubtedly, is going to be involved in many posts here. He is a blonde hair, blue eyed boy, really a man now, and we share brainwaves. This post is about how we met.
For those who don't know, I went to High School at a place I lovingly refer to as, American Leadership Academy. It's a hell of a school. I love it. It just feels different. There's a dress code that makes everyone look reasonably professional for high schoolers. Currently, there's a milion dollar football field, 2 basketball courts in this k-12 school, a stage that owns a piece of my soul, and it has all the usual things that you'd expect in a school. In September of 2005, That wasn't the case. Our school lacked a lot of novel things like, you know. Grass. We didn't have grass for months. We didn't have ceiling tiles. In fact, the days before school began people came in to volunteer, myself included, to move things like that in. And desks. And hang white boards. There were cranes at the school, and most of the windows weren't fully sealed. Suffice it to say, it was unique to start from.
The cast of characters was also pretty different. Some kids were like me. I was a decent kid, and got less than stellar grades. Nothing horrible, but my parents didn't approve of C's and B's when I could get A's. They looked at ALA (short for American Leadership Academy, and an acronym you'd better get used to) as a fresh start. I had a few great friends, and a girl that I had a HUGE crush on. Those things weren't calculated in when my parents told me I was going there. So I wasn't thrilled about wearing Khaki's and polos every day. That was one type.
Another group was kids who had been home-schooled, or were otherwise socially awkward. ALA has never had a graduating class bigger than 93. Mine was 57 in 2008. The year in question gave us a whopping 12 Alumni. For these kids, it was a way for their parents to allow them to come to a good school that didn't have a bad name, or lots of questionable kids, because, hey, there weren't a lot of kids. So for those of you at home, we have kids who don't want to be there, kids who have never been to a public school (Charter Schools > Public schools. Charter schools =/= Private Schools.) and then the third group.
This is akin to the first group, only with a bit more edge. The last group consists of kids who were on their last chance. There was a considerable volume (for a school with 100 kids in it) of kids who had already been expelled from other schools. The starting line up at the beginning changed drastically over the weeks, months, and years ahead. However, with that background, I can now introduce my Ayrian friend.
There was an English teacher who was widely regarded as borderline insane. He's brilliant, just rather unorthodox. It was in this class that we met. We talked, and were cordial. He was friends with the pretty new girl I met. This pretty girl would often tell the friend in question that he could learn Chivalry lessons from me. This was hardly the truth, but we played with it a lot. the guy and I would make dramatic scenes of opening doors, and him struggling to do so. Bursting into applause for small acts of gentlemanly excellence. He got so good under my tutelage that by the end of the year, I used him to ask a girl to prom for me. He waltzed right into her Dance class (fitting, right?) and gave her a dozen roses. It was very cool. Here's the moment I'll always remember though.
We built tables. To this day, there are plastic picnic tables outside of the school. Like I had mentioned before, we didn't have anywhere to sit. Everything was dirt, and everything else was concrete. We couldn't, (or maybe just couldn't bring ourselves to) eat inside during the late summer. However, on one of these early days of school (had to be the first two weeks because the pretty new girl left to her old school after that) we saw the tables. They were in card board boxes with those big plastic straps. We managed to get a few of them out of the boxes, and just put them together with the instructions in the box, and the tools that they included. In retrospect, it was highly awesome of the boxes to come with their own tools. We had a Regal Throne for the pretty girl to sit on, which, of course, added to the score in my friend's Chivalry count. We built something together, and it has lasted for six years.
That's my defining moment for to you today.
No comments:
Post a Comment