Point of View

Pool Side

I decided to don my swim trunks and get comfortable by the pool. After twenty-nine days of 110 plus degrees it seemed like the thing to do. The pool water, having soaked up the sun all day had the cooling effect of a Turkish sauna leaving me yearning for autumn and the cooler nights that follow.  Once again the soft glow of the rising moon keeps watch over me as I study its surface trying to focus in on the Sea of Tranquility or “Mare Tranquillitatis” in Latin(1).  This lunar location is best known as the landing site of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission and it leaves me wondering if the flag Neil Armstrong placed there still flies.
The moon falls out of focus and I drift back to a time when the biggest worry I had was getting a black eye during a school-yard fight. I met Scott when he and his family moved to Chicago from Cincinnati. We must have been in the fifth or sixth grade back then. Scott was this skinny kid with a handsome smile, thin brown hair which would lighten during the summers, and a love of nature. His shyness could only be attributed to being “the new kid,” but somehow we made a connection. We couldn’t have been more different in that he came from a nurturing home life while I was from a broken home. He was a straight “A” student and I could care less. I used to refer to myself as “the kid from the wrong side of the tracks.” I was mostly a loner, or as I refer to myself now, solitary, having few friends I could tolerate. Scott was solitary as well, but it was more the result of being new to Chicago.  I can’t even remember what first brought us together but it is a friendship that has endeared the test of time.
His family took me in as one of their own and it was a welcome refuse from the turmoil of my home life. An alcoholic for a father, I was left with no male role model and as “stand-in” father to my two younger sisters while mom worked. It was a time before computers and cell phones and Scott and I would take off on our bikes for hours scouring the parries and fields of our then, small town. Typical school-boy antics were the norm but nothing to extreme. We would enjoy putting pennies on the Laramie prairie rail road tracks and then hiding in the near-by bushes patiently waiting for the next train to pass and flatten our copper currency. Scott enjoyed collecting beer cans and had a handsome display in his attic of cans from all over the world. I remember Scott having a very controversial -at the time- Coors beer can and how it was “smuggled” into Illinois. At the time Coors was not sold east of the Mississippi, so it was a prized possession for him.
As the years past our lives took different paths. Because of geographical location we were forced to go to separate high schools where we met new people and made new friends. I enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating a semester early and Scott went onto college. He married his high school sweet heart and is now an associate professor at the University of Oregon. I still feel like the kid from the wrong side of the tracks in some ways but we still talk through very long emails from time-to-time. A few years ago we had an impromptu reunion of sorts meeting in Salt Lake City for a conference he was involved with as part of his job. It was like old times even after almost ten years apart. Of course he is no longer the skinny little kid of yester-year and I am sure I look older too, but for that week in Utah we were kids again exploring parries and fields.


(1) Latin word idea “Mare Tranquillitatis" taken from the text of www.lunarregistry.com/land/tranquility.shtml where for a small fee you can "purchase" land on the lunar surface. Interesting web site.