I imagine that most kids wouldn’t admit to this publicly, but I’d bet a steak dinner that many of them do miss going to school right now.
It’s been just over a month and a half since the hallways emptied out and the school doors were locked in the midst of the COVID pandemic. To those middle-of-the-road students who thought of going to school as a chore, I’m sure they looked at it as something of a super early summer vacation. The less-cynical ones, meanwhile, genuinely miss it.
Heck, I’m in my mid-30’s and even I miss my own school days.
Specifically, I miss going to school in the building that’s about a good football throw’s distance from my home, Conquest School.
I was driving past the old brick institution the other day, which now calls itself a community centre, and I started thinking about the comparisons to the current effects of the pandemic and the closure of the Conquest school back in 1996.
Today’s students have been robbed of their final few months in the classroom due to a virus pandemic. I was robbed of my last year at Conquest School because of a decision to close the doors and bus everyone to Outlook.
Everyone has memories of their school days, especially those precocious elementary years where your young mind is still trying to develop and all the adults around you are keeping you in a protective bubble from the harsh realities of the outside world. You know how it is; you want kids to keep their innocent views of the world around them, so you shield them from all those controversial “adult problems” that permeate the 6:00 news.
My memories of Conquest School are simple, yet plentiful. That’s probably the same for many of you reading this. It didn’t take much to excite us or keep us entertained as kids, did it? Put a movie on in the classroom and our entire day was made. Let us have gym outside in the sun and we were all smiles. A field trip scheduled for an entire Friday where our parents came with us? Dude, it may as well have been a three-day weekend as far as we were concerned!
Just as any other school did for other kids, Conquest School certainly kept us entertained and instilled a sizable bank of memories in those of us who attended.
There was Jam Can Curling, which was just curling except we used detergent and bleach jugs filled with ice. I guess when I think about it, this was a great exercise in offering a sport while at the same time protecting your investment. After all, it doesn’t really matter if you bust up a few plastic jugs by hurling them against each other, does it? Doing that with actual curling rocks, well, that certainly does matter.
Hot Dog Days were always anticipated. The local Elks lodge would stop in and cook up enough hot dogs to feed a small army and us kids were more than happy to gobble down. Pair a couple of dogs with a nice cold Vi-Co chocolate milk and it made for a hell of a meal. I swear, with their buttered buns and Heinz ketchup on top, I can just *taste* those hot dogs right now.
Track and field was pretty big in Conquest because it’s where other schools came to hold their events, thanks to the massive field right next to the school. The track days were always held on a Friday, so it felt great to go and take part in a few events before calling it a day for the week.
Then, of course, there were the field trips. There were many over the years, and they all produced their fair share of memories, but I’ll always remember the very last one because it was the last hurrah for Conquest School. For a couple of days in June of 1996, the entire school was bused down to Regina to stay at a hotel and check out some sites, including the Science Centre and the RCMP museum. We gorged on dozens of pizzas at the hotel, then swam them off in the pool. We darted in and out of hotel rooms like puppies on a sugar rush. Before long, it was time to go home, and there was such a sense of finality to the whole thing. The trip wasn’t just ending, but our entire school was. I remember seeing teachers and parents crying, and I wish now that the full brunt of the situation would’ve registered with my young mind.
Something uniquely special was now a thing of the past.
Man, I guess I just miss the innocence of my world from a quarter century ago. Time gets away from us, and before we know it, we’re older and we allow ourselves to become cynical and much more jaded.
Why do we always have to do this annoying ‘growing up’ thing?
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
