DAMAGE CONTROL

I understand that the publisher of the Athens Banner-Herald held a meeting with the paper’s citizens’ advisory board last week and explained that everything in the local alternative paper about the firing of Editor Allison Floyd was inaccurate. Leaving that aside, it was still the most poorly handled management move in recent local newspaper history.

HEAT CONTROL

I’m impervious to summer, pretty much. If I’m out walking, I get hot and sweat, and the same goes for working in the garden, but in summer I pretty much confine those activities to the earlier, cooler hours. During the heat of the day, most days, I’m surrounded by air-conditioning, so summer just passes by outside the window, waving brightly. Just one more way my life is homogenized and chilled. Is my mind warped by this separation from the natural world in one of its most spectacular seasons? Is my body weakened? Am I well on my way to becoming a fair-weather zombie, affected neither by heat nor cold?

These thoughts are possible to me only because I got my start in life at a time and place not insulated by air-conditioning. Thus, the Georgia summer was an immediate part of our lives. We were out in it; no use holing up inside, because it was pretty hot in there, too. Just as well we were out of school, for the same reason.

We could walk downtown (we called it “uptown”) or hop along the fiery sidewalk on our bare feet to the movie theater for the Saturday double-feature plus serial (we called them “continued pictures,” and come to think of it they prepared us for “Mad Men” and all the other TV programs continued from week to week). Until the churches finally got in on the act, the Greenland Theatre was the only air-conditioned place in town. I can still remember the heat blast of re-entry back out onto the sidewalk and the afternoon sun when the movies were over. It seemed impossible that anybody could survive in such heat, but soon we were used to it again and stopped noticing it.

And, of course, the heat of summer intensified the pleasure of those activities designed for escape from the heat—swimming most of all. In Greensboro, GA we had no public swimming pool, and nobody had one at home, either, until much, much later, when cousin Miles Walker Lewis built his pool—the one the cow wandered into, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

The Oconee River was out there, but it was a long way to go on a bicycle, and our mothers wouldn’t have approved. Richland Creek was polluted, even though that’s where we got our water supply. There were various ponds with muddy, gooshy bottoms. We could go out in the front yard and squirt the hose on each other, but that wasn’t very satisfying. Best of all was when we could convince our mothers to take a bunch of us down to Alexander H. Stephens Jr. State Park at Crawfordville, where there was a small lake with a long slide that you climbed way up the steps to reach.

The alternative, in the other direction, was Legion Pool right here in Athens, now under the threat of death—something else funky and fun to be torn down by the university and replaced by something boring and sterile.

We made the long ride in the hot car, the back seat crammed full of sweaty bodies eagerly envisioning that first plunge into the cool water.

Those trips began before I knew how to swim, but that didn’t keep me off the incredibly high high dive at Legion Pool. You climbed fearfully, thrillingly up the long ladder until you could almost see all the way back to Greensboro. Then you stepped off into space and plummeted down to the cold water. And then you did it again. Except that I had to go off the side of the board, to stay closer to the edge of the pool, since I couldn’t swim. So, I had to aim for a spot among all the teeming heads of swimmers but far enough out that I wouldn’t crash down onto the concrete edge. Then I had to struggle back and climb out and repeat. In that struggling, I was learning to swim. And pretty soon, I could, and then I could go off the end of the board, confident that I could make it back.

The cost of gasoline for Mama to drive us over to Legion was no doubt less than swimming lessons, and the process was a lot more fun. I guess you could call it distance learning.

Pete McCommons [email protected]