By Joey Lisser

My locker is a crazy, funny, happy, somewhat disorganized, and very interesting place. It is sometimes the place where I stop and gather my things and thoughts at the end of the day; it is sometimes the place where I start the week on a Monday morning, tired from the weekend and dumbfounded how much work I still have to do before I get to the next weekend; and it is always the place where I can find an extra gym uniform somewhere under a bunch of textbooks. My locker, like everybody else’s locker, has a story to be told.

Before I even existed on this planet, it was the locker used by legendary Georgians, including Mark Wilkins, a world-famous race car driver; John Millen, a bronze medal-winning sailor at the Olympics: and Alexy Boggian, the famous Swiss politician and environmentalist. This means my locker has seen a lot. It was there on the day that Mark got his driver’s license and ended up forgetting it on that rusted, sandpaper-like piece of metal on the back corner; it was there the day John came back from class after just learning he would be writing the two tests the next day that he missed while he was on a sailing trip in the Florida Keys; and it also saw the day that Alexy decided he wanted to take his learning in science about climate change and turn it into action.

It might be time for my locker to retire. It is well on its way, as it has a pension of germs, Febreze, and a few rusty nails; however, if it will last just one more year, maybe I will be added to the list of Georgian greats. Maybe my lock can be another one of those locks that has to be cut off by the Maintenance staff because I forgot the code after the winter holidays, and maybe my locker can look back at me and challenge me to do better, as it has and will for generations past, present and future.