Yesterday while I was in Ypsilanti I had a few minutes and went by two places that were formative for me as a child and as a young man.
The first trip down memory lane occurred when I went by my old elementary school - Ardis Elementary. It is now called New Tech High School @ Ardis. It is not an elementary school any more. I wish I had better memories of school as a kid but I have to say most of them are pretty bad.
The first picture I took was of the back door of the kindergarten area. The school would make all us kindergartners wait outside of the school by this door which was locked till the random start of school time when they would open it for the little cold kindergartners. Why they didn't open it sooner is a mystery to me. Most likely the teachers did not want to deal with the kids too early in the day and do their job. Anyway, I remember waiting outside this door for school to start in a crowd of cold 5 year olds. I also remember the mean neighbor kids who would come looking for me to terrorize me before school and how scared I was of them finding me. Why the dang school couldn't just let us in when the bus dropped us off in the 5 degree cold of the harsh Michigan winters when the buses dropped us off, I will never know. But I hope those kindergarten teachers got their morning coffee in peace while my baby John psyche was scarred for life.
The next picture is of the younger half of the school playground. You can still see the mulch from the playground equipment that is now gone. I remember this because I remember one time I saw a bunch of the popular kids sitting on the equipment talking and having fun and stupidly I told one of my "friends" named Nick that I saw some of them making out or something stupid like that. Well, my "good friend" Nick promptly went and told these kids the rumor I told him about them and I then had the 8-10 most popular 6th graders mad at me and after me because of the rumor I had told my "good friend" Nick. He promptly became one of them due to his "whistleblower status" and I suffered terrible anxiety for about 48 hours. I told the kids I was sorry and they soon forgot about it but I remember how terrible I felt when it all went down.
The next picture is of the field where we used to play a game fondly known as "smear the queer". This game consisted in taking a football, 40 wild kids and a hardened winter or fall field and throwing the ball in the air. Then whoever was crazy enough to try and get the ball would promptly be run down like a lame wildebeest by a hugh pack of leopards into the ground, tackled and then the ball would be thrown into the air again. I tried to play it with the best of them, but for some reason did not get far with the ball before I was promptly "smeared". I don't know why this and "poop stick", another of my favorite childhood games have not persisted as basic outdoor kid games but for some reason Glo and Johannah and Mark and Ethan never mentioned them when they were in elementary school.
The next picture is of the dodgeball wall. 20 of us kids would get a nice fat dodgeball and we would line up against this wall. One of the kids would then throw the ball as hard as possible at us trying to hit us with the ball. If you caught it you were then next thrower. If you got hit you were out. The thrower was trying to tag the group members out. I just remember the thrill of trying to catch the ball, and the fact that on the rare occasion I caught it, some super sporty kid would quickly catch it on my weak throw and I would be back in the target area before I even got warmed up.
The next picture is of the four square patio. You can imagine with all my previous glorious escapades on this playground, how that turned out, but lets just say I was not a champion 4 square player.
One happy memory I have is of playing snow football in front of the school in this area near the front of the school when it was wintertime. My friend Jeff and I and a few others not selected to play with the real football would find a piece of ice and use that for a football and 4-6 of us would play a mini game of football with basically a snowball. I just remember it was fun.
Now Ardis elementary is a technical high school. Go figure.
The next memory is of UPS in Ypsilanti Michigan. It is worth mentioning that in 1988 when I was working there they kept talking about building a newer facility for the comfort and safety of the UPS workers. Believe it or not, that never happened, it looks exactly like it did then. Amazing.
This picture is of the truck line. I did not remember how long it was. The entire line of
the conveyor belt would be full of backed up trucks and one of my jobs was to unload all of these trucks by throwing the packages down a slide that would extend into the truck as fast as possible to get them to the flipper (another of my jobs) who would stand at the junction of the unload conveyor belts and flip all the boxes to their label side up so they could then be loaded into the semi trucks by the loaders.
There are two of these unload lines and I was responsible for unloading the trucks and then driving them out of the building and parking them.
This next picture is of the parking lot where I would anxiously await seeing the Lovely Larisa waiting for me in the parking lot. Sometimes she would be there, sometimes she would leave something in my car for me to eat or a note, one time she put stickers all over my blue firebird, but the best was when we would meet there and kiss in the parking lot because she couldn't get enough of my manly self after work. I am sure I smelled so good.
So, those are my memories of Ypsilanti as I drove by some of my old haunts.
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