I was sitting in the waiting room for my first appointment with a new dentist.....
I was sitting in the waiting room for my first appointment with a new dentist. I noticed his diploma on the wall, which bore his full name. Suddenly, I remembered a tall, handsome, dark-haired boy with the same name had been in my high school class some 30-odd years ago. “Could he be the same guy that I had a secret crush on, way back then?”
Upon seeing him, however, I quickly discarded any such thought. This balding, gray-haired man with the deeply lined face was way too old to have been my classmate. After he examined my teeth, I asked him if he had attended Northmont high school.
“Yes, yes, I did. I’m a thunderbolt,” he gleamed with pride.
“When did you graduate?” I asked.
He answered, “In 1975. Why do you ask?”
“You were in my class!” I exclaimed.
He looked at me closely. Then, that ugly, old, bald, wrinkled faced man asked, “What did you teach?”
At one point during a game, the coach called one of his seven-year-old hockey players aside and asked, “Do you understand what cooperation is? What a team is?”
The little boy nodded in the affirmative.
“Do you understand that what matters is not whether we win or lose, but how we play together as a team?”
The little boy nodded yes.
“So,” the coach continued, “I’m sure you know, when a penalty is called, you shouldn’t argue, curse, attack the referee, or say offensive words.
“Do you understand all that?”
Again, the little boy nodded.
He continued, “And when I call you off the ice so that another boy gets a chance to play, it’s not good sportsmanship to call your coach ‘dumb’, is it?”
Again, the little boy nodded.
“Good,” said the coach. “Now go over there and explain all that to your mother.”
Compiled by Usama Rasheed
