by Matthew Dearden

Created on: May 16, 2009

One of the more memorable trips in my high school days was a National Honor Society trip to Seattle my senior year. I had been in the National Honor Society since I was in the tenth grade, but I'm still unsure if I ever did anything honorary as a member of this venerated national organization [Note: This probably doesn't apply to your school. This is my theory: in my town there are more bovines than humans, and cows don't give a rip about honor societies. It does, however, look good on a college application]. Every spring and fall we did participate in a road cleanup event, but I didn't consider this too great a sacrifice because I usually approached the event as more of a treasure hunt. Most of my finds have long since been forgotten, but the principle of it is still ingrained in my head. To top it off, we usually got to wear orange vests, and on the good days, helmets. Personally, I always thought it was kind of fun walking along the road with reflective vests, grimy helmets, and white bags looking for half empty beer cans, wet candy wrappers, burnt cigarette butts, and used Kleenexes, but not everyone was so enthusiastic. [As a side note, during one of the roadside cleanup days, one of the kids found money, and this nearly made the front page of the Village Voice, our school's monthly community newsletter. I would know, because I was the editor. This story was eventually cancelled, however, because one of the cows in the dairy down the road birthed a six-legged calf, and we had to put that in the issue instead].

I was originally told that the National Honor society was a national service organization, but pretty much all the other events that we ever did focused around raising money so we could go on a trip every year [There was one exception to this-the annual goodie plates for older residents of the community. We usually did these around Christmas time, and the term "goodie" is used specifically here because as we all know, senior citizens can't really eat too many sweets (as a side note, I'm still not sure why this is-I will probably find out some day; either that, or not find out, or just die). As a result, we included teas, nuts, and a limited number of sweets. Every once in awhile I have nightmares in which I included something in one of the plates that directly led to a heart attack. God have mercy on me if I ever did].

One of the people we always delivered these goodie plates to was my grandpa, who is a quadruple bypass surgery survivor,

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