What are we doing here? We are in the lunchroom and there are only boys in the class. Maybe that makes this is H.P.D. Ahh, you had forgotten about the esteemed course of Health and Physical Development! Now that was a give away course for almost all of us at Oak Bay High School.
Just look at these enthusiasts! Do they not typify the attitudes of alert young Canadian minds, hungry for learning?
They are a lazy bunch. They are lounging around in the dying days of the school year in the slackest class going, H.P.D. They look like so many house cats snoozing on a sunny carpet. In a minute we will have a film. The projector has been delivered but it has not been rigged. Probably some nerd like Nightingale will do that in a minute.
What is written on the board is tantalizingly fuzzy. Some lettering can be made out but much is just a tad too woolly. When the principal task of putting prints up has been fulfilled, one of the subordinate tasks will be to examine this negative, perhaps optically, to find out what is up on the board. For those of you with equal curiosity, what can be made out is "SNRDS" and "PLO". The meaning of "PLO" is clear enough but "SNRDS" brings back no memory.
What are we watching here?
The exception to credits being "given" for H.P.D. was a fellow who could not take the course at school. Where we were simply given the H.P.D. credits and vegetated in class, he had to do actual course work. He had to do that because his schedule of regular classes did not allow taking H.P.D. In order to finish high school he had to have those H.P.D. credits that we were given and the only way to get them was to take an actual correspondence course in the subject. Would that unnamed gentleman care to step forward, identify himself and tell us what the real H.P.D. course was about?
What we are watching in there is not at all clear.
What is this, fellows? Does anybody remember what we were up to here? It looks like an industrial film. Here's a closer look at the screen. A guy in hard hat, goggles and smock is decanting something from that broad scoop he's holding.
The very best H.P.D. class we had consisted of a lecture from a "friend of Joe Wilson". He proved to be a man of substantial personal courage.
He told us about the abyssal depths that he had sunk to, of nights literally spent in a gutter and the help that he had received time and again from the Sally Ann. The details of his benders were really not the story that afternoon, though. What impressed many of us was his determination and, ultimately, his success in understanding himself.
The time that that man invested in us on that afternoon gave us a profound insight not just into the problem of alcoholism but an insight into how a very ordinary person armed with an unremarkable intellect could muster courage and examine his personality in the minutest detail.
With the knowledge gained, this gentleman had taken charge of his personality and returned himself to a normal, productive life.
