A Fresh Look For A Freshman

Day 69

Was I really this skinny once?

Did I really used to have a full head of hair?

My ninth grade/freshman year (1988-1989) was the year I debuted a brand new look: wearing contact lens!! Goodbye to nerdy glasses and hello to looking cool (at least that’s how I felt I looked).

I got my contacts as a birthday present, so I was able to break them in and get comfortable with them during the summer. I wore the contacts during the daytime, but then I’d have to take them out at night and place them in a special case that was put inside of a little heater (to help keep the contacts clean--rather bizarre, huh?) And once a week I had to put the contacts into little containers to be soaked (using little tablets that had the same effect on water as Alka Seltzer--also rather bizarre, huh?)

Anyway, by the time the new school year began I thought I had it all figured out. Except that I didn’t. The first time one of my contacts started to irritate my eye I took it out and realized that I didn’t bring my contact lens case (whoops!) or my glasses. So what did I do? I took out the contact lens and carefully wrapped it up in some tissue paper and put it in my jacket; then I spent the rest of the day with only one contact lens in (so I was partially blind). I had a headache by the time I came home, then I took out the tissue paper and found that my contact lens had hardened and shattered!! Oh, crap!! Well, I learned my lesson and from that time forth I always had my contact case, saline solution (to keep my contact lens moist and clean) and my glasses!

Back to the ninth grade, I had a lot of friends and fun times…unfortunately, this affected my grades. Let’s just say that I didn’t make the Honor Roll at all this year!! However, I did have a couple of really cool classes and I earned good grades in these classes: there was Speech, English, Reading and Seminary.

Seminary was my favorite class in ninth grade! Living in Rigby with a high population of LDS members, Seminary was offered as a “release time” class, and I had it in my 7th hour, the last class of the day, which was awesome!! The seminary teacher was Brother Wilkes and he was the best! He was this very tall guy with a terrific sense of humor and a strong testimony of the Gospel - the perfect balance of entertainment and enlightenment.

We covered the New Testament in Seminary and over the course of the school year our class was able to watch two really good movies (that became two of my favorite Biblical movies). One was called Quo Vadis? (1951) and the plot concerned the plight of the Christians during Roman times, under the tyrannical rule of Nero. At one point the Christians are captured and taken into a coliseum to be fed to lions!!

The other movie was Ben-Hur (1959), a brilliant epic that won 11 Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Actor for Charlton Heston); Heston is the title character, Judah Ben-Hur, who is betrayed by his friend, a Roman soldier, sent to prison and then sold as a slave. Both movies were very powerful and spiritually uplifting and edifying.

Anyway, I had some really fun times in the ninth grade, my last year at Rigby Junior High. At the end of the school year I had many good friends sign my yearbook and I was actually sad that school was over. Little did I know that later in the summer I would find out that my dad got a job transfer and my family would be moving in the fall to…Greeley, Colorado.

To be continued…