It’s funny which childhood memories stick around in your brain.

Learning about the four Carlton Trail Toastmasters getting ready to compete in Saskatoon brought back fond memories of my own public speaking days when I was a kid.

Mostly fond, anyway. I’m still mad about that one kid’s stupid speech, and how the stupid judges fell for it.

I was in Grade 6 and my teacher picked me to speak at the Optimist Club speech contest - an alternative to the Legion competition most kids did.

I wanted to talk about something important, so I put together a five-minute speech about Martin Luther King Jr. and his own “I Have a Dream” speech.

I don’t remember much about my own performance, but I do remember the disbelief I felt when another competitor did his speech on the day in the life of a microphone.

A microphone must feel so cramped when it’s locked away in storage, and then bask in the freedom of finally being used, he said.

Sure, it’s a cute conceit, and he spoke well enough, I thought. But c’mon. It’s not exactly important, is it?

So imagine my surprise when the guy actually won. I couldn’t believe the judges would lean so much to style over substance.

To be fair, I do appreciate style - my younger brother won a couple of competitions with a speech on speeches. It’s an incredibly risky topic - you could end up lost on a Mobius strip of irrelevance - but he made it work with a twinkle in his eye and bit where he “accidentally” dropped all his cue cards, only pull out a spare set.

In Grade 8, at a bigger school, I went even bigger, with a speech on the history of Canada. I won the school competition but didn’t go any further than that.

In truth, I never did match the heights I reached in Grade 2 with my recitation of “Please Clean Up Your Room!”

But I suppose that wasn’t the point, was it? The point was, I could eventually step up to a microphone at Bolt FM and not feel nervous.

And I suppose maybe - just maybe - that microphone was happy to meet me.