I have spent the last four weeks, four days each week, walking with ghosts. You see, I have spent the last four weeks, four days each week, walking around my old high school, West High-currently known as Metro Tech in Phoenix.

Now I have been on this campus since I graduated in 1976. But only in the office and limited areas, not deep into its compound like where I am currently teaching. Nothing to cause me to walk through or drive around the grounds, until now. It has been 33 years since I have seen some of this place. Although the campus has expanded and is almost all new, there are still reminders of the past. It couldn't be helped, the images from the past. They just showed up.

I drove onto the campus this morning and down a driveway next to the football field. I had spent hundreds of hours on that field, the stadium structure still there although they don't play football there anymore. I passed the open handball courts, just south of the stadium. I had played hours of handball there with my peers. We tried racquetball but eventually we stuck with the purer sport of handball. Next on the right as I drove was the JROTC building. Back in my day it was where four teachers taught government. it was also the only drinking fountain for the football players, wrestlers, track personnel, and anyone else on the field. One drinking fountain. Gosh, we would take one water break during the 3 hour practice and god help the guy who got stuck in the back. Coaches didn't want you "spending all day guzzling water." I remember getting stuck behind Geek Squint Richardson. A great guy but he could suck water like a camel. He wore white cleats, too. Riddells, which had an air of whatever to those traditional athletes who stayed black with the little white Riddell 'belt' around the heal and the red soles. You had that one little fountain of water coming out and it just wasn't enough to stop you from peeing a yellow the likes of which are not seen at any other time. There was no such thing at water on the football field. Why? We had that drinking fountain.

Right across from it was the men's locker room, now a state of the art weight room. That was where Big Ken Bell prided himself on being able to stand his practice jersey up on end and lean it against his locker. Our senior year, he wanted to go all season without washing his practice uniform. When you blocked him, your face burned from the ammonia. It was here, in this room of lockers, I began wearing Mennen Skin Bracer, same as my dad. I still do. You can buy it at all of your fine grocery stores. After Friday night games, there was always a dance in the gym and we would come out of the locker room, me in my Letterman's jacket, and a fresh splash of Skin Bracer.

I was standing in the gym, waiting for my kids to line up when suddenly, I realized I was standing in the gym. It's interior hadn't changed-at all.

The new library sits on top of the old Auditorium. We use to play full length movies in there on Friday's. For a buck you could come in and see such great movies as Patton, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I gave my student body president speech right about where the copier is now in the back of the library. Next to it was the pool. It's now a drainage basin for rain runoff.

Behind the pool was the archery range, right next to the old parking lot. Me and da' boys took archery our senior year for P.E. We thought it would be funny to crank the elevation and see how far into the parking lot we could send the arrows. We stopped when George Payton almost hit Miss. Ward. She was a teacher who wore coke-bottle glasses and clown dresses. No, really, they were dresses you would swear clowns wore in the circus, a bad circus, like out of a nightmare.

The track and practice field now has a 80,000 square foot garage on it for tech education. As I continued around to building 900, my building, I drove on the track, or where the track use to be. John Kopchek use to run sprints there. At the far end, where the shot-put pit and the goal posts for the practice field were, Joe Jackson almost hung himself going out for a pass and catching the rope the linemen used for practice, right across the throat. Coach Johnston told him to get get some water and he'd be fine, as soon as he could breath again, to hustle back; he was needed to run some pass patterns. "That last one looked like a 'G.D' abortion." You always seemed to know where Coach Johnston stood on things.

Yep, lots of ghosts here. But then again, where do we go and leave our footprints that we don't also leave a few of our own 'ghosts'?