See?! I don't have only female friends! Dave is a "teacher friend" though and it may be his "fault" I am a Principal today. But, first-things-first, going back several years he is also my answer to the question, "Where were you when 9/11 happened." I was carpooling to work. With my friend Dave. Oblivious to anything that was happening in the world....
I guess that means I met Dave 13 years ago. Although not a new teacher he was newly hired to the middle school where I had already worked for six years. Even though he was teaching grade eight, and I was teaching grade five, our classrooms were side-by-side. I helped him....decorate? What do guys do to their classrooms? Whatever they do, I helped him do it.
Living close to each other in the northwest, we also decided to carpool. On September 11, 2001 it was my turn to pick him up in Silver Springs. I was driving "Big Red" as Dave called the Buick Park Avenue, with 500,000+km, my dad had given me so that I could get rid of previous car payments for awhile. (A quick aside, Big Red didn't last long...) As though an out-of-body experience I can distinctly remember reaching for the volume knob to turn down the radio as he was coming out of his house that morning. A newsman on the radio had just reported that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Centre Towers and, as I was adjusting the dial, I recall thinking some rookie pilot clipped a wing of a small plane. What else would it be?! Dave got into the car, we drove 30 minutes to Airdrie and upon our arrival learned the world had changed.... But this post isn't to be all profound because I don't really remember much about our ride home, or the next days, or anything associated to each other after that. We were new friends but still mostly just colleagues. He's just the answer to that question. Everyone has an answer.
But he's also the one who inspired me to start my Masters which was a precursor to where I am in my career today. He had already began his Masters and just hearing him talk about it piqued something in me. I realized I "felt like learning something" again. I think I enrolled the following semester into the same program and it was great! (And, in retrospect, I am SO glad I did my Masters while still teaching. I have colleagues who are finishing theirs while already working in administration and I can't even imagine!!) Dave and I had a few courses together. A favourite university story is around the project he and I completed for one of our Statistics courses. We had to come up with a hypothesis which could be measured both numerically but also qualitatively. Dave and I sat outside La Vie En Rose (a lingerie store) in Market Mall and tallied how many people, and of what gender and apparent demographic, looked directly at the displays in the store window and who averted their eyes. Like the previous story, I don't actually remember tons of details after that. I just remember we had some laughs while doing our "research", and I think we got an A-. Why not make learnin' fun? That's what we try to do for our students!!
Dave and I are both administrators now. We haven't worked together for a long time, and don't see each other all that often, but have still kept in touch through mutual career pursuits and he is still one of my favourite people with whom to talk shop. Other than seeing each other at meetings, we meet two or three times a year, over baked lasagna at a small restaurant in Silver Springs. He generally makes me feel bad about myself while there because, as though the baked cheese on top of our pasta weren't enough, I usually also drink beer or wine. He rarely does. His excuse is generally that he has to run 10km on the treadmill, or stop off at the pool to swim 2km on his way home. Dave does IronMan triathlons. So this is where talk about anything we have in common ends!
Thirteen years has passed quickly and although our personal lives have changed a lot, the ease by which we can find things in our jobs to talk about and laugh about has not. He likes to point out how I'm much older than him. I like to bug him about his fashion sense (he is a LuLu Lemon and Banana Republic snob!). He's a solid guy and a good friend. Glad he needed help decorating!
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