When I stopped in for the alumni / open house day last week, several of the hallways still contained pallets of bins. The bins contained the contents of the classrooms, items which need to be moved to the new school. But the most interesting part of these hallways: Well, the lockers, of course! After all, we all had one. Four, actually…one per year. Except I had five…

This is what a bank of normal lockers looks like. Tall and skinny, like I used to be. Okay, I used to be skinny. Anyway, every year students at Mandan High are issued a new locker. I barely remember where my freshman locker was located, I have no recollection of my sophomore or junior lockers, and I had two lockers as a senior. Why? Because, as hot rod motorheads know, there’s no replacement for displacement.

These, however, are band lockers. Notice something different? Yeah…if I had something in common with those skinny lockers pictured above, I have a lot more in common with these lockers now. They’re larger, of course, because band kids have instruments, sheet music, and other accessories as part of their school kit, and they need more space.

I’m not saying how, but in my fledgling days as “the guy with the mad hookups” I was able to secure one of these for myself. In fact, as I type this, I think I may have enjoyed this perk my junior year, too. In any case, I rarely even used my “upstairs lockers”, as it was much more handy to have one on the same floor as the library, the cafeteria, and the exit. But enough about my propensity for “sticking it to The Man”…

I don’t remember my locker numbers, not one of the five. Do you remember yours? This may have been one of mine, since I have a thing for numbers, but I can’t say that with any confidence.

Okay, then…how about your combination? I think I may remember one of mine, but I’ve offloaded that kind of data in favor of other combination locks which I still use in the course of my business. Even so, I don’t know if they change the combos, or if they move the locks around…doesn’t really matter after all these years, anyway.

What a fantastic color scheme! Red, green, and blue. I wonder what the new school will look like…

A locker is of special significance to a high school kid. After all, that’s your space…the only little sliver of space you’ve got in a big, crowded place. It seemed only natural to give them special mention in this series of posts.

Next: a post about a few little quirky things I saw that day. See you soon!