Sullied

There was an elderly widow that lived down the street from me as a kid. She was one of those adopted grandmother types of deals. I would ride my bike over to her house and bang on her back door and she would invite me in and give me a snack and we would sit and talk. She had lived in the small town that I am from her entire life. She lived through the depression and picked cotton on her parent’s small farm. Most of the time I would sit there she would tell me stories about those times. How hard things were and how they only had onions to eat for some meals or pokeweed for another. I liked those stories but they were all the same. Every once and a while I got lucky and she would throw a real odd one in there.

Once she told me a story about how her parents built a pool when she was a kid. As the story went, her dad and a small crew discreetly dug the hole for the pool by hand because there wasn’t a lot of access to heavy machinery back then. It took a few months to dig the hole, another few months to put in the concrete and finish it off. After that, it took even longer to fill it up with a slow trickle from their well.

The family had been waiting for the inaugural dip for almost half a year. When the day finally came it coincided with a record breaking heatwave. It was also a Sunday and before the family could swim they needed to repent. Back then the only reason you didn’t go to church was if someone was dying, and in that case, you’d end up back at the church for the funeral to make up for the time.

As the family sat through what I have to assume was a fire and brimstone sermon in a sanctuary hotter than pits of hades the only thing that got them through was fantasizing about ripping off their Sunday clothes when they got home and hopping in that cool well water. I can only imagine them sitting on uncushioned, hard pine pews, fanning themselves in a sweaty pile of taffeta and lace. Wool, pomade, and leather.

Small towns, no matter the time period are all the same in the way they communicate. You can’t do a thing without everyone else knowing about it. That is especially true if you hand dig your own pool.

When the family got home and started stripping off their clothes they were greeted by a commotion in the direction of the pool. They made their way back to find several families floating about and playing in the virgin water. The word this lady whispered as she told me the story was hillbillies but there aren’t that many hills in central Georgia. Either way, these people obviously had not been to church that day and had materialized from the pagan wilderness.

You would think that the man that spent so much time on this pool would be livid but the report I got was he was quite calm at first and politely asked the woodsfolk to leave. They gathered their things, but one fellow was stayed in the pool. An elderly man, floating around in a bucket, because I guess buckets were the foam noodles of the day.

This old man was totally naked and could not free himself from the bucket which I guess he thought was hilarious. The father did not. He eventually removed the man from the bucket by the side of the pool with a tree branch. After some choice words and warnings, the woodsfolk disappeared back into the pagan wilderness from which they came. Now, finally, it was time for the family to enjoy their oasis.

As the kids went to jump in, the father stopped them. He grabbed a shovel and started throwing dirt into the pool. There would be no swimming in the pool. It had been sullied. Soiled and spoiled, by the unworthy and the unholy. The kids were devastated. When the pool was finally filled in they never talked about it again.

I used to think this story was absurd until I graduated college and someone gave me a coffee cup as a gift that said, “Congratulations Graduate!” on it. I don’t recall who gave it to me and I doubt much thought was given to it, I just put it in a cabinet. Then one morning I woke up to find my brother’s girlfriend drinking out of my “Congratulations Graduate!” coffee cup. To that point, I had not used the cup...and I never did. I simply let her finish and then I smashed it in the trash can.

Nobody could use the pool after it was tainted and nobody could use my coffee cup. Stupid? Yes. Selfish? Perhaps. But sometimes there is therapy in knowing that if you’re not the first to use something, you can make sure you are the last.

I really miss that cup.