Today, it hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit!
Global warming at it best, and it was a beautiful day.
I belong to a group involved with raising finds for the expansion of our local history center. It is a wonderful genealogical library, one of few you will find (
http://www.bassetthistoricalcenter.com/). Tomorrow night we are having a fundraiser, a bluegrass and gospel music show at the old high school auditorium. The school, built in 1948, closed and was sold off a few years ago and the owner is graciously letting us use the auditorium. It did however require cleaning. Lots of it.
Talk about deja vu, a cloudless sunny morning and I climbed those stairs to the front door, it could have been 1966 with little imagination. Inside, past the memorial for the 5 students who died in Vietnam, I was handed my rag and can of Pledge, and headed into the great concrete and wood paneled hall where as a boy I saw and got the autograph of the great Lester Flatt and the Osborne Brothers. The rows of seats covered with graffiti, some of it carved with knives in the days before metal detectors by men who are now Pap-Paws. "Hello Dolls" one seat read, I could not count the initials.
I made a full circle of the room, wiping down the paneling and baseboards, the edge of the stage. There were about a dozen or so other volunteers, all awash in their on memories, of school rivalries, of the band class that practiced on the stage. It is amazing how nasty a place can be when it is shut up.
My pocket rang and I seen it was me friend esseffjoe, so I ducked out into an adjacent court yard to speak to him. The place was a-bloom in forsythia and daffodils. It was like something you would see at an old girls school. I sat on the bench in the warm sun and took it all in.
I will be listening tomorrow night, to the vibrations of the strings, and think of Scott in his performance, best wish to you my friend, and you and you and you!