I have to confess to an extreme dislike of all hot and humid weather. Yet, since I have lived in the south for most of my life, this is the norm for around seven months of the year. Today it is particular hot, even before 9:00 a.m. The pets are already panting and they're inside! But it started me thinking of all the ways we tried to keep cool before water parks and sometimes air conditioning!First, like most kids, we used the water hose. This was a short-term solution because very quickly the water became hot. Second was to find a friend / location with a pool. I grew up in a lower middle-class community and this wasn't an option. Time to get creative . . .
When I was a child, one summer we discovered the pleasures of digging holes in the loose red dirt near our house and filling it with water from a nearby creek. The creek you see had two disadvantages that prevented it from becoming our pool of refuge. One was the common sight of snakes seeking the same relief that we were. Two was the shallow depth that ran for most of the length of the creek. So buckets in hand we would transfer the water to its new home. This endeavor sometimes took us all day and forced us to even brave the snakes for a short-term diversion from the heat. The end result of hours of effort resulted in the dirtiest and warmest pool I've ever participated in. However, no other way existed in our pool of resources to come up with any other solution that would enable us to get wet and dunk our fellow sufferers. Hosing each other down forced us to stay within proximity of authority and we would have stayed boiling hot all day rather than submit to that environment.
So homemade pools were the norm until I started junior high school. Then one of my best friend's parents built a pool on the side of the mountain that resided on the back of their property and suddenly summer became bearable! In fact, we began to count down the days of what passes for winter in the south (there is no spring and only two weeks of fall) and longed for the day when the wonderful world of aqua was created anew. Since no one lived within miles of my friend's farm we cranked our music as loud as we wanted and swam and yelled and camped out all summer long.
We also discovered after our bodies grew tired and our fellowship seemed secure, that telling each other stories of our short lives to that point was the next step in our growing friendships. This led to moments of briefly pulling back the curtains that are the facade of adolescent boys and letting your closest friends see the fear and doubt that seemed to grow bigger each day. The strength from knowing that girls were a mystery to us all and dreams were our thoughts when doubts were napping. That church was boring and drinking cost too much money. That praying was tough and physics was even tougher. We discovered on a clear night we could each claim over a hundred stars for our own. Our friendships became less about milestones of action and more about wanting to see each succeed with our true character and dreams intact. Such was the advantages of friendship without fear. We also learned a quote that has stayed with me for over thirty years:
"The quieter the mind, the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is." Meister Eckhart
