​Vignette 2

Finding an old photograph, I wonder.

I’m guessing college days, early nineteen fifties. Looking into these eyes, what’s he thinking
about? He’s in his twenties, getting ready to graduate. It’s springtime in southern Virginia and the campus
is in the early stages of bloom after a long cold winter. Green shoots are popping out on black limbs and
grass is viridian, having changed from the dull, lake mud green of bitter February.

Is he thinking about the Art History paper he doesn’t want to write for Dr. Thompson, or the party
planned at the nearby lake? The party that will have the jazz combo set up on the back of his fraternity
brother’s flat bed. The jazz combo, the jazz music, he doesn’t even like. Even though, the female singer
can sing, a strong alto.

Is he thinking about working his uncle’s farms in Leatherwood again this summer? That high
school did offer him the football coaching job. No, that would mean teaching. He didn’t want to teach.
Football, it was always satisfying to show those private school guys from Richmond what being hit was
really like. They’d laughed at his 225 lb., five-foot six frame. They soon stopped.

He could join the merchant marines. He and Pete had talked about it. Both had only seen the
ocean one time. Perhaps he could sail around the world like James Fenimore Cooper and later write
stories of the sea or the American frontier. The army wouldn’t take him. Four F. Did he know the
merchant marine recruitment officer would tell him to come back tomorrow morning and when he did,
they were closed?
​
Looking into these eyes, the world is ahead of him. A world as vast and rich as the Bach Mass in
B Minor or as beautiful and sad as a Hank Williams lyric. He won’t write the Art History paper. He’s
thinking about the party.

​- Owen R. Minter