I could ride my bike to school. The first time I did, it changed my life. Walking would take me about fifteen minutes. Riding my bike would take maybe three and that’s if I got caught by the light. It didn’t matter as much coming to school, but going home was a treat. School dismissed at 3 PM and I could be home with a snack watching Scooby Doo by 3:05. There was nothing like the feeling of whizzing past all the suckers walking home.
Loogy races are quite possibly the grossest thing I have ever witnessed. In the winter, time was passed waiting for the door to be unlocked by having loogy races. For those who may not know, a loogy is a snot filled glob of spit. Some of the guys would snort and hock until a sufficient loogy was present. They would then spit it onto the side of the dumpster and see whose loogy travelled the farthest before freezing. Gross.
One morning I arrived at school before anyone else. It was a cold winter morning and so I was standing inside the inset entrance way to stay out of the wind. There was this older kid who didn’t go to school. We all knew who he was, but no one really knew him. I saw him approaching me and I started to freak out. I didn’t let him know that, but inside I was a ball of fear. As he came right up to me, he pulled a knife. I managed to grab each of his arms and somehow held him off. I was able to get around him and I took off running. I turned to see how far I had separated myself from him, but unfortunately, he was running too. The dumpster was right next to another entrance, so I climbed on top of it and got on the roof of the school building. He was still hot on my heels. The problem was that I had nowhere to go. I was running down the length of the building, but it was a dead end. When I got to the end, I just jumped. I hit the ground and rolled. I looked up and saw my pursuer wasn’t willing to take the leap. He just waved me off and walked away. One of my friends soon showed up and asked why I had been running on the roof of the school. He had seen me but not the nutcase with the knife. Most people I tell this story to don’t believe me.
The exterior of the gym wall had a huge pad of asphalt in front of it. We would hit tennis balls against it for days.
One night a week, the school would host roller skating in the gym. You could rent those brown skates with the orange wheels. I went often.
On the playground, there was this weird thing we called the mushroom. It was about eight feet tall and composed of three vertical poles with a top covering it all. Each pole had these steel discs that could be used like steps to climb up to the top. We would then climb up on the very top of the mushroom and hang out. We would scratch our names into the paint. Everything on the playground was a potential deathtrap. Monkey bars, giant rusty rickety rocket slides, giant swings that would let us fly fifteen feet in the air, merry go rounds that would go so fast the centrifugal force would send kids flying. It was the playground where we gained a sense of our mortality.
We went to Toronto for our sixth grade class trip. Our chaperones spent the evenings drinking in the hotel lounge.
Every year, we had a balloon day. Each child filled out a card with their name, grade and teacher. It also had the school’s name and address on it. We attached the card to a helium balloon and the entire student body would go outside and let their balloons go. After a few weeks, we would start to get responses from the balloons. Farmers would find the balloons in their fields or people would find them in their yards. Many of the were found in Canada and the New England area. Once in a great while, the would make it overseas. None of mine were ever returned. At least I wasn’t like some unlucky kids who watched theirs go straight into a tree.
Joel Stiff's Adventure 