Some old friends

Fule for Thought

 

I’ve developed a very loud whistle in my nose. I know it sounds nuts, but I just got my first bad cold in almost two years, and I think the whistle is tied to that! If I breathe through one nostril or the other, there’s no noise. However, when I inhale strongly with my both nostrils, there’s a loud, high-pitched whistle. Great, with the gap in my front teeth, I also whistle when I hit just the right combinations of the letter “s”! I feel like a tea pot, I’m whistling so much. How’s that song go again? 

“I’m a little teapot short and stout” … I just remembered why I hate that song! It’s bad because there’s nowhere in my house if I want to get away … they hear me wherever I go! Even the stupid hedgehog is coming out constantly now, and he’s recognized my whistle, too. He waits at the cage bars now for his live mealworm feast!

I don’t know why, but when I was delirious with my cold, I began to think back on my high school days. There was a short-lived tradition for some of my pals to party on our one story school roof. I was not even there that night, but they all feel I was!  In their alcohol induced memories, I was right there. They drank, one cut his hand, and genius that he was, he wrote their initials on the roof skylights so they could be read clearly come Monday morning! One pal, Dave, broke his foot kicking a roof pipe, thinking it was an empty bottle. My other pal Kirk fell on the descent from the roof and put out his back! He came to school bent over, Dave hobbled in on crutches, and the other Dave had a bandaged hand! Yes, they were caught, and given a week’s detentions for their ascent on “Everest”!

Our Canmore High basketball team became pretty good by our Grade 12 year and we went to a tournament at Golden, B.C. Our starting forward was a guy named Mike, and to this day, I don’t know what he was thinking. We had a really nice bus, and were enjoying the ride to Golden. I never paid attention to what Mike was doing, but what he was doing, was drinking a large 4 litre jug of orange juice on this ride!  Do you know what a large jug of fibre-filled orange juice does to a teenaged guy after about a four hour bus ride? Yeah, that’s right … Mike never got to start that game against Golden, because he was in the bathroom with a horrible case of the runs! Oh, he’d wander out and get ready to sub in, but then we’d see his look of panic, pain, and cramps, and then he’d race back to the change room! That change room was also our team’s half-time meeting place! We chose to meet on the opposite side of the gym against the wall! We lost that game by a good-sized score, and no one wanted to sit near Mike, or share a motel room with him!

The next weekend saw us go to Standard for a small tournament. We got along well with the home team, but we were amazed at the school and town. We looked across the fields and you could see all the way to the horizon! I asked how could anyone ever make a break for it; you’d be seen cutting school for miles!

Mike was always a “loose cannon,” and you never knew what he’d do at any given time. We were set to play a good Rosemary team, who had even brought their cheerleaders. We had never seen this before, and it must have struck Mike as funny, because when they made their cheerleading “tunnel” of pom-poms, he ran through it with the Rosemary team! He didn’t just run, he sprinted yelling unintelligible things, wearing a towel on his head and sunglasses! Rosemary’s team did not like this, and began to stare him down, just in time to see him grab a set of pom-poms from one of the cheerleaders. Sadly, it was the girlfriend of their basketball captain, and we watched stunned, as their whole team got up and began to stride toward Mike! What could we do? We all stood up as well, I mean even if Mike was stupid, he was still our stupid! 

Luckily for us, the whole Standard team got up as well, and the situation fizzled out … but I still smacked Mike in the head when he came back to our bench! It was to be the start of a short, weird friendship between he and myself, and we wound up being university roommates, but that’s another story!

(“Fule for Thought” is a slice of life humourous column that appears in the Strathmore Times, written by long-time resident, town councillor, high school teacher, coach, husband and father of two – Pat Fule. If you would like to get in touch with Pat, you can send him an e-mail at Pat.fule@shaw.ca)