MindSpinner

“We need a picture of you when you were a cheerleader,” my student told me, sharing the idea for the feature article. We’re getting pictures of Mrs. M and Ms. S, too. Then we want to take pictures of all of you in our cheerleading uniforms - then and now.” She was all enthusiasm.

I tried to envision me in a cheerleading uniform now, with a little shudder reserved especially for my thighs.

I wasn’t a real cheerleader. I was never a ribbons and bows girl, a doer of back flips, or a death-defying flyer atop a tower of girls. We were a simple lot, we cheerleaders at a tiny school in the mountains. Our mothers made our uniforms, or we did - I made mine - and we jumped and whooped and hollered and performed maybe a dozen simple cheers. I was a cheerleader because cheerleaders got to go to all the basketball games, home and away, and I could jump and yell “Umph! Ungawah! Falcons got the soul power!” better than I could shoot a basketball in a game.

At one time, there was a picture of me in a cheerleading uniform, back in 1974. I can almost remember it. My hair is long and straight, a bronze-streaked blond I will never see again except from a bottle. The uniform is a simple, solid maroon jumper over a gold shirt. I look as if I might have crawled right out from under a collard leaf, so unsophisticated am I in this picture, at thirteen years old.

Dutifully, I looked through two albums tonight, though I haven’t seen this picture in years. Sure enough, it is not there. It may be in one of my mother’s albums, back in the mountains, in her house not a mile from the smallest school in the entire state of Georgia, where I was, for one whole basketball season, a cheerleader.

I noticed, as I scanned photograph upon photograph, that the old Polaroids - the ones we children loved to see pop out from the camera, the images emerging from the smelly film like ghosts to become bright familiar faces - are growing dark now. We are all receding, as if someone is slowly dimming the lights around birthday party tables and some lasting night is falling over the lake, the mountain, the pasture, and the horse I used to ride in midafternoon.