#5 Thing I'll Miss About Home

Living right next to my high school.

This is another thing that seems to defy logic. Why would I miss living near my high school? Shouldn't I want to get as far away as possible from such a place? I guess not. There is something pretty cool about hearing a Friday night high school football game take place while you're sitting on your couch. I think I might actually miss that football field more than the actual school itself. Just for some background: we got a new, state-of-the-art high school building in 2002, my freshman year of high school. My class was the first to spend all four of their high school years in that building. It was pretty great. We also got this expensive new football stadium with synthetic turf, which is pretty damn nice.

I never really used the field while in high school, but coming home from college made it seem all the more useful. Over those summers, me and my friends would play evening games of frisbee up on the field. We'd usually start at 8, and as it got dark, the lights of the stadium came on and remained on until 10, when we would retire to the huge pole-vaulting mat to talk about life. Always good times. Looking back, it's actually hard to believe the amount of people we started to get interested in frisbee. I'm convinced that me and Dan were the ones who started by tossing with one another. It soon grew into a huge affair, with some of our games drawing as many as 20 people.

Maybe this sounds stupid, but sometimes those frisbee games were all that I looked forward to during the summer. Even the time that I got a concussion by diving headfirst into Nate Carr's knee, I think I still ended up playing frisbee the next night. Or a few nights later. Whenever it was, I was there. Because when you inevitably got that text from Dan or Doug that read "frisbee?" you couldn't text "Hellz yes, bia" fast enough. Was I the only one who got that excited about a friendly game of frisbee? Maybe so. Probably Dan too. But I would literally get my shoes on at 7:30 and stretch for a half hour before heading up to that field. For someone that takes life pretty lightly, I took pre-frisbee preparations pretty damn seriously. Quads, hamstrings, calves, groin. You gotta stretch, man.

Point being, those frisbee games are something I'll never forget. And part of the charm was playing them on that awesome football field - our own high school football field. With high school friends. Sometimes frisbee was basically the only time I got to see a lot of my high school friends. There were numerous things that made those games special. And I'll never forget them. Or the football field. Or the high school in general. Being able to see the high school from my bedroom window wasn't something I always enjoyed. But when it's gone, I know I'll miss it.