Eddie Lowe
Just A Thought
I go back in my mind to recollect summers of my youth — my parents taking us kids swimming at the river. Many of the swimming holes had names. One was called “the bluff,” while another was called “the Davis hole,” and another called “the pinky hole.” To this day, those names bring me right back to summer and the water.
Dad was 36 and mom was 31 when I was born. Two beautiful people in their prime and with lots of energy meant lake trips. Mom and Dad went to Claytor Lake most weekends even before I was born, so you could say I was born to love the water. To this day, if I think hard, I can remember riding on dad’s shoulders as he waded in the water.
Summertime in the 80s brought age for mom and dad, and with age they sold the boat and lake life was over. It was then that us kids went to the pool simply called “the Y.” The mill our parents worked at offered membership, so off we went. It was not uncommon in those days for bunches of kids to walk there. During the lunch break for the pool many of us would walk uptown to CF Jones for ice cream.
Later, as a teenage boy with my friends, I also walked to the river. The spot we went involved a bicycle ride to a cow pasture (where AES on Riverside Drive is now located). I can still remember the horse flies nipping at us and the scare of a bull as we ran across the pasture to a spot called “the blue hole.”
Oddly enough, I didn’t see the ocean until I was around 17 when the parents of some friends took me with them to Atlantic Beach. We stayed at the Iron Steamer motel, which is long gone. I can still taste the first gulp of ocean water as I screamed with delight!
Summertime in the 90s brought marriage and kids of my own. It was my turn to carry kids on my shoulders into the water and hear their delighted screams. Sunburn and sand marked every summer for my kids and me.
But summertime flew by and fall rolled in. School started. Years piled up, and the kids grew, and I found myself feeling older. I suppose the toughest trek any parent makes is trying to carry all the beach toys and chairs across the burning sand only to stay one hour! Soon, it seemed a rented tent and chairs were the way to go. As I look back, those were precious times when lasting memories were made.
Summers in the 2000s still involved beach trips every summer with the kids, and their friends would come too. It seems that when your kids have friends along it isn’t as hard. I started playing golf, and the beach is a golf Mecca.
My dad had warned me of how time would fly by and of course I didn’t believe him. Soon my own kids would drive themselves to the beach and time really rolled on.
By the 2010s, summers were a blur. Work and bills seem to take hold, but the love for the water always remained.
Today, grown kids bring new joy to summer for me. Grandkids have come along, and my shoulders again bear a giggling child as we wade into the water. It doesn’t seem so long ago I was being carried and now I’m carrying grandkids. But the lure of the water and summer will always go hand and hand!
