As we think about good-news stories, it's important to remember that the stories from our past both the good and the bad are often tales woven from stories told by others and our own recollections, which can be inaccurate or colored by time. It doesn’t justify or excuse anything you do now. If it did, we’d all blame our current snack habits on that one time in kindergarten when someone took the last cookie. So, childhood memories—those delightful, occasionally cringe-worthy flashes of the past, as reliable as a game of broken telephone.
Now, before I was six, my memories were hand-me-downs from family lore—mom, dad, uncles, and aunts filling in the gaps of my selective memory. They’re my memories now, but let’s be real: I didn’t personally RSVP to that birthday party I allegedly cried at. That story’s all theirs.
What I do "remember" (with a generous dose of revisionist history) is playing with my brothers in some small Kootenay Valley town. I didn’t like school, so I skipped it. Now, some might say I "failed" grade one, but I prefer to think of it as an exercise in self-directed education. You can call it marching to the beat of my own drum. A drum that was apparently playing hide-and-seek in the woods while everyone else was learning how to read. This, of course, led to a restart in school when we moved to Vancouver Island. Some might call it failing grade one, but I prefer to think I was just marching to the tune of my own drums.
From age six to ten, we lived in an Auto Court, a motel with long-term rentals, where the annual flooding of the nearby river was a highlight of my year. I loved it when the river flooded every year. It was like having front-row seats in nature's waterpark. I started delivering papers in grade three and remember that long bike ride down narrow rural roads, though I was occasionally rescued by my dad when I got spooked by herds of free-roaming horses. Nothing says "character building" like your dad having to rescue you from what can only be described as a real-life reenactment of The Stampede. It took me about three decades to realize why horses freaked me out and could stop me in my tracks.
By grade four, we moved again. This time to a much smaller, tight-knit rural community where the population was about 40 kids in grades 1 to 6. It was like being the new fish in a tiny, well-established pond. If you've ever moved into a small town, you know how this goes: everyone knows their place in the pecking order and new people? Bottom of the food chain. I spent a year proving I was tough enough to climb that social ladder. Some learned to make friends. I took the "friendship with benefits" approach—the benefit being not getting pushed into the mud. It was a tough first year, but I learned that making friends was far more enjoyable than fighting. The next couple of years were pretty smooth. I was a big fish in my tiny pond by grade six, even managing my first band. We played one show at school before breaking up due to creative differences. (Translation: we were 12, and someone got bored.)
In grade six, we took an IQ test that determined our class placements in Junior High. This test was designed to sort us for Junior High. So, on the first day of junior high our names were called out in mysterious order. Spoiler alert: they were called by descending IQ score. I was in the second group called, which was a small victory until I realized all my friends were in the last group. Brilliant.
So, grade seven began with me in a new, much bigger school—alone in my class, with none of my old crew. This new school was a big change, where toughness gave way to intelligence and popularity as the metrics for success, and I was still operating under the "fight your way up" rulebook. Turns out, popularity is a whole different kind of battle. I was shy around girls and not very chatty with the guys, so I found my niche in the Drama class, hanging out with the troublemakers. We had our fun – staple gun fights in the cafeteria and crawling through crawl spaces making animal noises below different classrooms around the school. In grade 9 on Guy Fawkes Night, my friends and I made some fireworks (homemade, naturally) and were promptly ambushed by some other guys on our bikes. After a dramatic escape (cue slow-motion action movie sequence), I broke every finger in my hands, which was fortunate, considering the school strap session involving a spitball fight, the next week. My saving grace? My bandaged hands spared me from punishment. Silver linings, folks.
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