Roar for Orem High

My high school will be but a pewter pile tomorrow.
No more Cross-Hall.
No more D-Hall.

I won't be able to walk my grandchildren through the halls of my high school and tell stories of Mr. Downs running with stick in tow, ready to clobber the students riding Rusty the Rhino. Likewise, the stories of crazy Ms. Bestor or Ms. Stanton (the woman who has become a second mother to me) or when the orchestra pit threw bananas on stage during "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", all those stories will lose a tether linking them to reality.

But then I realized something: my mother never took me on a tour of her high school. Nor did my grandmother. Or, if they did, I don't remember anything.

I'm predicting that when I am an old fart and do have scores of grandchildren that I won't take them on a tour of my past. They probably wouldn't care much if I did.

Yes, a part of me feels like we're killing 50+ years of students and teachers and lunch ladies and stereotypes of bimbo-cheerleaders and stuck-up jocks and misunderstood gothics. You can tell that everybody else feels the same way because locker doors are missing and planks of wood from the stage have been ripped up: all recently removed by decades worth of students who all returned to their hormonal teenage roots to retrieve a piece of the building as a memento of "the good ol' days". I myself walked away with four cinder blocks. My brother has locker number 2009, which is also the same year he graduated. Yes, part of me feels like my past is being murdered.

But the more dominant part of me, the part that remembers high school as lonely and stressful and dramatic, the part that knows that I am more myself now then I ever was in high school, THAT part of me is at peace to see the building crumble.

I learned from the film Avatar that "we are all living on borrowed time and eventually we have to give it back." Orem High has reached that point. The building will die and decay. A new, young body will be birthed -- not quite replacing but perhaps superseding the "old" Orem High.

But the Spirit of Orem High will live on. Just as the Spirits of the pioneers, pilgrims, and prophets are with us, so is the Tiger Spirit.

GO OHS!