High School Dropout

Alas, I have become a one armed bandit. My left arm is unable to pick up anything now, even its own weight. A single sheet of paper is too much, that lift forcing me to brace my left arm against something sturdy, usually my own belly, then sort of wiggling my way up. If my arm is not braced against my belly, it simply falls to my side, to rest on the arm of my PWC.

Oddly enough, my fingers on my left hand can type just fine. It is fortunate that keyboard technology has come so far over the years. I remember typing class in Grade 9. We had these old manual typewriters where you had to pound the keys with all your might just to get a letter from key to paper. The Grade 9 class, mostly boys, looked with envy at the girls across the hall in secretarial classes; they had electric typewriters, although many of our looks across the hall had little to do with typewriters. After all, it was 1969. In keeping with putting a man on the moon, their papers just seem to fair whip out of their machines, the automatic margins and returns knowing precisely when their transcription efforts had reached the end of a page.

I did not enjoy high school. It seemed to me just wrong that teachers focused their attention on the athletically competent while those of us with intellectual capability were simply seen as grist for the mill of lumbering senior high students. Bullying, including physical attacks in many cases, was seen as a necessary part of life, needed to toughen us up for some imaginary adult life where physical attacks took place often and were not remonstrated by laws. In one notable incident, I remember being stabbed in the leg with a #2 pencil, always those damned pencils, where the graphite snapped off in my leg, there to remain right up into my adulthood. When I complained to the teacher, he professed to see nothing, going on to say that if I could walk I was fine.

I guess now that teacher would have to concede I am not fine. I cannot walk. His measures for health and medical acumen did little for those years. It was this same teacher who came up with the game of "murder ball", where the objective was to put people out by slamming them as hard as possible with a soft play ball while running about on an open field. It was kind of like dodge-ball on steroids. Needless to say, I went out early, and often, repeat hits being a perfectly acceptable method to get you back in. The game was ultimately cancelled by the school administration after a few boys, fortunately not myself, were seriously injured.

There were others in my school who had it worse off than me, who were smaller than me, who were less capable of handling those wretched physical monsters from Grade 11 and 12. I managed to escape Mission Secondary School at the beginning of Grade 10, fleeing my father's home, another place where wanton physical strength was all that mattered. Regardless of all that, school was done for me, at least public school. I dropped out of Grade 11, never to make it to the graduation stage.