50 years is an effing long time. Or, as my kids would say, “Mom and Dad are old AF!” They are not wrong. Pam and I were seniors in high school 50 years ago, and recently I have been thinking about that time in my life.
Today, I felt the need to watch the clip of the pool scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, not because it’s such a great scene, even though it is, but because the setting has shaped my life for the past 50 years.
In 1973, Pam and I were attending Beverly Hills High School, the location of the pool in the iconic scene. It is a unique pool because, for some ungodly reason, the designers felt the need to combine a pool and a basketball court in the same space, resulting in space savings but not yielding either a fully functional basketball court or pool.
But that is not the reason I am writing about the pool. The pool holds a significant place in my life because it connected me with Pam, even though we were not swimming or dancing in the pool at the same time.
It was the final quarter of the school year, and for some reason unbeknownst to me, the school district thought it would be a great idea to offer scuba diving classes as part of the physical education curriculum. At the time, Beverly Hills High School was a truly unique place to go to public school. I mean, how many other schools, public or private, had a planetarium on campus? None, that I have heard of. But that is not the point.
I thought it would be fun to learn to scuba dive. The school hired an outside firm to teach us how to use the diving equipment, and they supervised our class time in the pool. They also said that if we wanted to, we could become certified by doing a series of ocean dives on Saturdays in Corona Del Mar, some 50 miles away from the pool. As the cost of a gallon of gas was a paltry 39 cents at the time, I felt it was a good investment to make all the drives to get certified to dive.
Pam wanted to get certified, too, and while I don’t remember the reason why, she asked me if I could drive her to Corona Del Mar for the beach dives. I dove right into that one and said, “Sure!”
So, Pam and I spent several Saturdays in my car making the drive to and from Corona Del Mar.
During that time one of our classmates, Michelle, had a pre-prom pair-up party. I went. Pam went. Though we did not go together, we ended up spending time together at the party once Pam came to the unfortunate realization that her first choice as a prom date, Roger, was already taking someone else. I, along with most other dateless guys at the party, were her potential Plan B prom dates. Having had spent so much car time with Pam, I felt I had a good shot at being The Plan B Guy. So, after the party, I summoned up the courage to ask her to be my date at the prom, an event which occurred 50 years and one day ago. She said, “Yes!”
Thanks mainly to the pool, partially to Michelle, and partially to Roger’s date saying yes, Pam’s life has been intertwined with mine for 50 years, enabling me to have a wonderful life.