40 years ago this week

…I met the guy on the left, there, Ras Pierre Schenk. He’d go on to become my best friend, among other things (eg., we were the biker-jacketed John and Paul of the pop-punk powerhouse that was The Hot Nasties, among them).

Forty years! We were both leaning on the wall near the doors St. Bonaventure Junior High in Southeast Calgary one sunny morning in September 1975, and Pierre turned to me.

“Hey kid,” he said.

I looked at him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

I was reasonably certain he was going to punch me in the face, so I said: “Warren.”

“Mine’s Peter, but my friends call me Pierre,” he said.

So, I started calling him Pierre. And that was that, on the first day of school, forty years ago. Of first days of school, great things are sometimes made.