Good ol' Heritage Hills Christian Academy.  Bring your conservative christians, your social outcasts, your vagabond christian school seekers, your public school expellants, they're all welcome.  I met some of my best friends there.  From 3rd grade to 9th grade, I learned a lot, grew a lot personally, and I attribute so much of my life's foundation from lessons and experiences from there.  There's probably some sort of metaphor tying into the fact that it was filled with asbestos and is now torn down, but I live in a world of self-denial.

So many stories I could tell you.  Getting caught in the library with my first real girlfriend by my mother, sliding a table into the stomach of my math teacher who would later turn out to be my step father, being kicked out of class by my english teach who just happened to be my mother because "she couldn't stand to see my face.", how we used to ask our history teacher if we could go to the gym instead of having class; and we would, or how we'd skip the whole asking permission thing and just go right to the gym or to the closed off half of the 3 story ~30 classroom building to explore, or make our way to one of the numerous access points to the roof...Ah, the roof.  Such a huge building...100 feet?  We'd throw anything we found off of it.  One time, we we're running around the many different sections of the roof and one of my best friends, Dallas, nearly jumped into a section with a 30 foot drop to the second floor accidently.

But I'll spare the stories.  The real thing I look back to is what I made mention to in the first paragraph; How much I attribute that place in the forming the groundwork for my life, sense of humor, and attitude.  Could I have been a bigger achiever?  You betcha, but I wouldn't have had fun.  Infact, I probably wouldn't have learned how to have fun.  Life is a series of moments, and that's all you get.  Would the Federalist Papers have expanded my understanding of the government?  Perhaps, but I wouldn't have the pictures that I drew with friends that I have today.  Life can't be a structured, scheduled, organized, predictable thing.  Free thinking and human expression cannot have boundaries and limitations.  There are so many different people that I've been exposed to, and we all have our histories weaved together, so much thicker than just a public school experience of the same faces day in and day out.  We all learned together and grew together.  Maybe some were able to walk away from there without learning or growing spiritually, academically, socially, personally, or even creatively, and to those people, I apologize, but to everyone else, students, teachers, and parents a like: Thank You.