vignette

It seems a lot of people that I know did not have a very positive high school experience. Those who went to the high school I went to are an exception, including me. My high school years were pretty fantastic, actually.

High school in Quebec runs from Grade 7 to 11 and in Quebec is known as Secondary 1 through 5, often abbreviated as Sec 1 or Sec 5. Probably in Sec 3, or possible the year earlier, I joined the dance decorations committee as I had some friends who were doing this too, and I had a certain skill for the art that was required for the dances. I was part of this committee all the way until I graduated from Sec 5 and each year we came up with different and better ideas as to what we could do.

This vignette story isn't about the decorations, however. It happened on just a few occasions, or perhaps even only once, I can't recall, that after the teacher who was more or less supervising us left at, say, 9PM, and after we had finished the different pieces we were working on, say, at around 10PM, we had the run of the school to ourselves. There were no teachers, no faculty, no maintenance; it was devoid of personnel except for the six or seven of us left in the art room.

We decided to play hide-and-go-seek-tag through the school with individual classrooms off bounds; making use only of the hallways and stairwells. It was really rather of an experience for us to be running and launching ourselves down stair wells. Between floors, a stair well had a landing half way and we managed eventually to take a leaping jump not touching any of the steps to land on the landing, and then again take another jump to skip all of the subsequent steps.

The lights were off in the school, but there were street lights outside that cast light-reverse-shadows giving us sufficient ambient light to play.

Anyhow, I have fond memories of those days.