Nostalgia

My First School Library. Building is 84-years-old.
Photo Courtesy: Dr. Xiao

I checked my high school class homepage today, and saw that Dr. Xiao had uploaded lots of pictures of our school and its neighborhood. Suddenly I was hit by nostalgia. I was so familiar with that landscape, yet now I had to look hard to find the place that was ours. A lot of old buildings still exist. More new ones are making it a completely different place.

Stone Bridge. It is OLD!
Photo Courtesy: Dr. Xiao

I remember the river. I used to walk by it four times a day. I often walked with friends, talking about all sorts of things including what we’d be in twenty years (did I predict mine right???). We didn’t really enjoy the smell of the distillery on the river, but we did like the dried yams that were shipped there daily. And one day we chased a duck and a chicken into the river, only to be surprised that this chicken could swim! So much to the commonsense or knowledge from books!

We had a secret hiding place behind the school. A short hike led us down to the riverbank. We enjoyed basking in the sun, reciting the famous poem (野渡无人舟自横), and daydreaming. From there we forded a small creek to come to the foot of the reservoir dam. One day we thought we persuaded a girl from jumping into that reservoir. Of course this was probably all our imagination. But you can see that we learned to cherish life from a very young age.

Those were the good old days, fading back into my memories. When can we all get back together, telling each other our own stories of the past twenty years?