Listen to Jim’s 4-minute podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ahLIw13hY&feature=youtu.be
or read his story below…
NOWHERE NEAR TALL AND STRIKINGLY HANDSOME
I am the merest mere pre-teen you can possibly picture in your mind today, since I am somewhere back in time at the moment.
I the merest kid dare to push the big red Control button that transports me from today, all the way back to the first summer of the 1950′s.
The bombastic march from Puccini’s opera AIDA is about to begin as we kids of Vacation Bible School queue up and prepare to proceed lockstep into the cool interior of Forest Lake Baptist Church. Vacation Bible School is the only day camp my parents can afford, so to this day it is Summer Camp in sweet memory.
A loudspeaker crackles, a rusting needle descends to a rapidly spinning 78 rpm recording, and AIDA begins.
The hot summer sun weighs upon us as we dutifully descend into the shaded interior of the church.
As mere youth, we kids have no choice as to whether we will attend this camp. Indeed, we really don’t worry about whether it is desirable, we just welcome the break from being home all day every day with not much adventure in store.
The music ends and the needle noisily amplifies the endless blank groove until someone remembers to lift it and kill the volume. We stand silently in rows awaiting further instructions.
Finally, the director, Mrs. Campbell, joyfully greets us, leads us in prayer while we peek around to see who else is peeking around, then permits us to sit on the hard wooden pews. Today we are to recite memorized bible verses. I am thankful that we do this as a group, allowing me to mouth words I don’t quite remember.
Later, volunteer adults show us how to do crafts and clumsy arts. I get to build a lopsided lightly sanded-and-painted wooden kitchen shelf in the shape of an apple. This is a gift for Mother’s kitchen, a gift she keeps on display for the next seventy years.
Break-time Kool-Aid and cookies save my life while a 16-mm projector briefly entertains us with black and white cartoons and movie previews featuring heroes such as Gregory Peck and Popeye and Buck Rogers. What brings me back to the 1950′s today is the red button and a blurb about Gregory Peck that describes him as “tall and strikingly handsome,” a phrase I realize, even this early in life, will never be applied to the likes of me.
Short and strikingly wimpy, I still manage to find some pleasure in activities such as dodge ball and checkers, hymn-singing and hide-and-seek, and quiet time breaks while we study verses.
A decade or so later, when I am a public radio announcer, I queue up a recording of an entire opera and listen raptly, suddenly surprised when the march turns out to be my very own summer school march.
AIDA.
Till now, I never knew the name of the tune, but suddenly it brings memories of bliss, it introduces me to the world of grand opera, it resuscitates the best of what good spirits I still carry with me.
Thanks to AIDA and day camp, I can find respite in time travel, I can be at peace as a strikingly individualistic non-tall dreamer whose purpose is to remind those who read these words that there are enough fond memories stored up inside us to comfort and put us at ease just in time to face another day.
Just push the big red button
© 2019 A.D. by Jim the Reed