poetrybyheart.me

My high school class is between the every-five-year interval of our reunions. Now something even more momentous has moved some classmates to plan a get-together. We’re having a Four Score Party to celebrate our 80th birthdays. The travel logistics are daunting so I’m sitting this one out. Yesterday a classmate who is big on nostalgic websites emailed links to two sites for us to feast on. At first I didn’t want to take the time to read them. I’ve enjoyed the reunions over the years but am not a fan of the silly lists of how things used to be. However yesterday was rainy and I had nothing better to do. So I read.

One of the websites had the year-end report of the City Recreation Department a few years after we graduated from high school. Several classmates, mostly boys, “replied to all” about summer jobs they held that year. I did not know any of the boys very well. One wrote about his job emptying and cleaning the city swimming pool on Sunday nights. When he was finished, his job was to walk across the street to the City Water Department and ask them to turn the water back on. From his words in the email I pictured my classmate as a young man scrubbing the pool every Sunday summer evening and then personally interacting with someone at the Water Department to begin the process of filling the pool again. I had the beginnings of a story in my imagination. I could imagine (because I certainly remember) the heat of a Mississippi summer evening and where the boy might want to go when he got off work and friends he would hang out with.

If I were to go to the Four Score Party and have a conversation with my classmate I doubt his summer job sixty years ago would come up. It is funny to me that I see him more clearly as a person in his written words in a group email. It is funny to me that I am writing this post for people to read whom I will probably never see in person. And yet this is prime reality for me. Long live the mysterious joys of human imagination. Long live Word Press blogland!