Hey, friends...please visit my friend Jewel's website to read a story that I just love,
and I think you will, too.....
and I think you will, too.....
Summertime ....
My most vivid
mental snapshots from childhood summers center around the
Depression-era American Legion swimming pool in Macon, Miss. I spent
lots of long, lazy, sunshiney afternoons there in the '60s while in
town visiting my grandparents. My mama had spent her own summer days at
that same swimming pool when she was growing up in Macon in the '30s
and '40s, tanning with the help of baby oil doctored up with a few
drops of iodine. And my two sons, who, like their grandmother, grew up
in Macon, spent lots of happy, rowdy, little-boy hours there in the
'80s and '90s.
In my mental video of summer days at the pool, it's about 1965, and I'm 9 years old.
My little sister Cissy and I would leave together from Poppy and
Granddaddy's big white house and head down the long gravel driveway in
our faded one-piece bathing suits and flip-flops, with towels draped
around our necks. Sometimes we went barefooted, which children still
did a lot of in those days, but the asphalt streets got melting-hot in
August, and if we forgot our flip-flops, we'd have to hippety-hop,
hotfooting along on our tippy-toes until we got to a nice grassy yard
we could cut across. We knew which yards had lots of those
yellow-floweredy weeds with stickers, and which ones had lots of soft
grass and cool clover.
After a couple of blocks, we'd enter the
shadows of the little concrete-floored pool "office," where we'd give
our quarters to Miss Annie, the pool's proprietor, a 99-year-old
schoolteacher with wispy brown hair scraped up into a bun. We'd go
through the old-timey dressing room, stash our flip-flops and towels on
an aqua-painted bench, and step gingerly into the shallow tin pan full
of warm, milky-looking stuff that was supposed to kill the germs on our
feet. Sunscreen hadn't been invented yet, so we were suntanned brown as
saddle leather.
As we emerged from the shadows of the dressing
room, the pool area was blindingly bright, the powerful Southern
sunshine dazzling off the water and the white concrete. Kids were
everywhere -- splashing, hollering, sliding, diving, jumping, bouncing
on big black tractor inner tubes, dunking each other. Cries of "Marco!"
"Polo!" criss-crossed inside the chain-link fences, and the humid air
was laced with the acrid smell of chlorine.
The pool itself was
huge, and I am still convinced, had the deepest Deep End in the world.
It was a rare little kid who could hold their breath long enough to
swim down and touch the drain in its green, murky, terrifying depths.
Even on the hottest August afternoon, the Deep End was deliciously cool.
The four main features of the pool, beside the cold, green deeps, were
the treetop-tall metal slide, and the three diving boards: the Low
Board, the Medium Board, and - YIKES! - the High Dive. The huge pool
had three distinct areas: the Shallow End, the Middle, and the Deep
End. Little kids, whose mamas were sitting there in chairs watching
them, splashed around in the Shallow End. Kids a little bit older, old
enough to come to the pool without their mamas, hung around in the
Middle, and when they got brave enough, slid down the tall slide. But
the most fun of all was had by the lucky kids who had graduated to the
Deep End, marked off with a thick, worn blue and white rope.
Your first rite of passage in the Deep End was to jump, or even better,
dive, off of the Low Board, graduating soon to the Medium Board.
As soon as you mastered diving off the Medium Board, you were forced by
peer pressure to move to the grandaddy of all childhood challenges:
jumping off the High Dive.
"Jumpin' Off the High" was a
terrifying rite of passage for all Macon kids. If you had never Jumped
Off the High, you were just a baby, not worthy of respect.
I
have vivid memories of my first jump. I was pretty much the chicken of
my family, a little girl who read books all the time and didn't even
like to climb trees like my tomboy sister and our cousins did, so it
took a lot of coaxing from my friends to get me to take the plunge.
I climbed slowly up the metallic mesh steps, the same ones my mama had
climbed, higher, higher, higher.... hands sweating, holding tightly to
the metal pipes that served as handrails. Finally at the top, with my
heart pounding, terrified, I walked slowly out onto the damp,
burlap-covered board up there in the sky.
From the end of the
board, the Deep End was at least a half-mile down. After much mental
anguish and many yells from my friends way down there in the water
below, sure I would die before I reached the fifth grade, I finally
took a few steps, bounced, held my nose and jumped. Hitting the water
hard, feet first, I plunged down, down, down into the dark, chilly
depths, almost to the unreachable bottom -- scared, but alive!
I
can still remember the rush of triumph I felt after I fought my way
back to the surface and swam to the side to join my friends. I'd done
it -- I'd Jumped Off the High. I wasn't just a scared little girl
anymore. I'd passed the test, and graduated into the upper level of
sunshine-drenched joys.
I hope you have your own bright
memories of golden childhood summertimes. Fix yourself a big glass of
iced tea, pull your chair up under a shade tree, and dream about them.
Remembering will do you good.
My most vivid
mental snapshots from childhood summers center around the
Depression-era American Legion swimming pool in Macon, Miss. I spent
lots of long, lazy, sunshiney afternoons there in the '60s while in
town visiting my grandparents. My mama had spent her own summer days at
that same swimming pool when she was growing up in Macon in the '30s
and '40s, tanning with the help of baby oil doctored up with a few
drops of iodine. And my two sons, who, like their grandmother, grew up
in Macon, spent lots of happy, rowdy, little-boy hours there in the
'80s and '90s.
In my mental video of summer days at the pool, it's about 1965, and I'm 9 years old.
My little sister Cissy and I would leave together from Poppy and
Granddaddy's big white house and head down the long gravel driveway in
our faded one-piece bathing suits and flip-flops, with towels draped
around our necks. Sometimes we went barefooted, which children still
did a lot of in those days, but the asphalt streets got melting-hot in
August, and if we forgot our flip-flops, we'd have to hippety-hop,
hotfooting along on our tippy-toes until we got to a nice grassy yard
we could cut across. We knew which yards had lots of those
yellow-floweredy weeds with stickers, and which ones had lots of soft
grass and cool clover.
After a couple of blocks, we'd enter the
shadows of the little concrete-floored pool "office," where we'd give
our quarters to Miss Annie, the pool's proprietor, a 99-year-old
schoolteacher with wispy brown hair scraped up into a bun. We'd go
through the old-timey dressing room, stash our flip-flops and towels on
an aqua-painted bench, and step gingerly into the shallow tin pan full
of warm, milky-looking stuff that was supposed to kill the germs on our
feet. Sunscreen hadn't been invented yet, so we were suntanned brown as
saddle leather.
As we emerged from the shadows of the dressing
room, the pool area was blindingly bright, the powerful Southern
sunshine dazzling off the water and the white concrete. Kids were
everywhere -- splashing, hollering, sliding, diving, jumping, bouncing
on big black tractor inner tubes, dunking each other. Cries of "Marco!"
"Polo!" criss-crossed inside the chain-link fences, and the humid air
was laced with the acrid smell of chlorine.
The pool itself was
huge, and I am still convinced, had the deepest Deep End in the world.
It was a rare little kid who could hold their breath long enough to
swim down and touch the drain in its green, murky, terrifying depths.
Even on the hottest August afternoon, the Deep End was deliciously cool.
The four main features of the pool, beside the cold, green deeps, were
the treetop-tall metal slide, and the three diving boards: the Low
Board, the Medium Board, and - YIKES! - the High Dive. The huge pool
had three distinct areas: the Shallow End, the Middle, and the Deep
End. Little kids, whose mamas were sitting there in chairs watching
them, splashed around in the Shallow End. Kids a little bit older, old
enough to come to the pool without their mamas, hung around in the
Middle, and when they got brave enough, slid down the tall slide. But
the most fun of all was had by the lucky kids who had graduated to the
Deep End, marked off with a thick, worn blue and white rope.
Your first rite of passage in the Deep End was to jump, or even better,
dive, off of the Low Board, graduating soon to the Medium Board.
As soon as you mastered diving off the Medium Board, you were forced by
peer pressure to move to the grandaddy of all childhood challenges:
jumping off the High Dive.
"Jumpin' Off the High" was a
terrifying rite of passage for all Macon kids. If you had never Jumped
Off the High, you were just a baby, not worthy of respect.
I
have vivid memories of my first jump. I was pretty much the chicken of
my family, a little girl who read books all the time and didn't even
like to climb trees like my tomboy sister and our cousins did, so it
took a lot of coaxing from my friends to get me to take the plunge.
I climbed slowly up the metallic mesh steps, the same ones my mama had
climbed, higher, higher, higher.... hands sweating, holding tightly to
the metal pipes that served as handrails. Finally at the top, with my
heart pounding, terrified, I walked slowly out onto the damp,
burlap-covered board up there in the sky.
From the end of the
board, the Deep End was at least a half-mile down. After much mental
anguish and many yells from my friends way down there in the water
below, sure I would die before I reached the fifth grade, I finally
took a few steps, bounced, held my nose and jumped. Hitting the water
hard, feet first, I plunged down, down, down into the dark, chilly
depths, almost to the unreachable bottom -- scared, but alive!
I
can still remember the rush of triumph I felt after I fought my way
back to the surface and swam to the side to join my friends. I'd done
it -- I'd Jumped Off the High. I wasn't just a scared little girl
anymore. I'd passed the test, and graduated into the upper level of
sunshine-drenched joys.
I hope you have your own bright
memories of golden childhood summertimes. Fix yourself a big glass of
iced tea, pull your chair up under a shade tree, and dream about them.
Remembering will do you good.
By Celia DeWoody
Published in the Harrison Daily Times, Aug. 1, 2007
Harrison, Ark.
Copyright CPI, Inc. 2007
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