30513 Memories: Friday Nights

The distance from end to end hasn’t changed. It's still about a mile and a half from one to the other. Someone or some official governmental body from the city, county or state put up red lights now that slow things some. Businesses have come and gone over time with maybe a few remaining to this day. Despite any changes, that short stretch of road has seen a lot of traffic over time and back in my day was the place to be on a Friday night.

We always called the southern end the Plaza because that was the name of the shopping center there, anchored then by Johnny’s Food City. Across the street was The Trailer, a pretty good place to eat a chicken basket. It sat beside Wilson's Used Cars and the Plaza Barber Shop where fish and deer hung on the wall and hunting and fishing magazines were your reading option while you waited your turn between the tall tales exchanged between scissor snips. You could hop on the street then drive northeast passing by a residential area and the old city hall and the telephone company and then further down past Sue's Burgers, best in town always, eventually ending at Sky City, the closest thing we had to Wal-Mart in those parts in those days.

Driving that endless loop, largely one long straightaway, was what we did when the school week ended kicking off each weekend. We drove from one end of town to the other on the road the state called Highway 76. I guess officially at some point it is known as 1st Street. Some of us called it Top Street since it sat at the top of the hill where the older main part of town rested below. Others called that certain strip of asphalt the Main Drag. When we got to the other end, then we drove back. We might stop to talk with other friends we saw out that night. We might even stop to talk to a carload of girls we knew. Sometimes a car full of folks from Gilmer County or Union County had wandered into our county no doubt we felt from hearing about the crazy Friday night cruise scene but more than likely trying to spy out a potential love interest or maybe just to stir up trouble with someone.

We might stop in at the Get n Go to pick up a Coke then play a video game or to add two dollars of gas to the car. Some went to the Swan Drive-In where the movie started at dark. Others found the bowling alley their speed. The fall of the year saw the high school football team playing under the lights down the hill from the Plaza and then to the left down the street near the Levi's plant and the offices of the Georgia State Patrol in a valley just down the hill on the south side from the buildings that made up the high school many of us attended.

Admittedly, looking back, there wasn’t that much to it all. You hoped you had a full tank of gas at the start of the evening, and depending on when you had to be back home and how many stops you made in the evening, you hoped you had enough to make it back home and then through the rest of the weekend when it was all over. The mountain towns where we grew up offered little but empty streets when darkness gathered on Friday nights especially if you had some wheels and time on your hands so this ritual became part of our generation.

When you’re in those later teen years, those few hours of freedom with the friends you just know will be around forever, are plenty enough to make memories that last a lifetime. There was nothing to compare with driving into town with your car or truck, still wet from a quick rinse with the water hose from your backyard topped off with a 96Rock tag on the front of your vehicle and wheels slicked shiny with Armor-All. A slow drive from one end of town to the other with an eight track of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band or Lynyrd Skynyrd blasting out the rolled-down windows just waiting to see what the night would bring was the ideal way to end a week and start the weekend. If the tunes weren't available then a lot of vehicles probably had glass-pack mufflers so everyone else in town would know someone wanted to be noticed this particular evening.

Depending on how slowly you drove the ride would only take five or so minutes. If you ended up at the Sky City end, you could decide to travel in between the parking rows which could take longer than the drive back to the plaza as the vehicles congregated making the traffic there almost always bumper-to-bumper. For some the parking lot here, in the shadow of Pizza Hut, was the place to hang out making it the pinnacle of teenage Southern Friday night freedom, at least until everybody had to go home.

If you felt adventurous, driving out Aska Road to hang out with friends whose parents were out for the night might be in store every once in awhile. Maybe a short drive to the dock down at the lake's edge or across the lake to Morganton Point could be in the plans.

Those were the days.

I could lament how kids these days don’t do this anymore. I won’t. That they don't do what we did might not be such a bad thing in this regard. There were a few things that went on that folks our age probably shouldn’t have done even after being warned by our parents or wiser friends to not do. Still, today, the world is a bit more off it’s rocker than back then, less understanding, less forgiving, less tolerant and more judgemental than it thinks it is. You could get away with more back then but you were also more likely to be called on and held responsible for your own actions, stupid or otherwise, than you would be now. Maybe it all trades off one for the other in some weird way that I am not sure I can grasp. It's not going to happen these days anyway since so many kids don’t seem to want to drive now until they are old enough to vote. Back then, we not only couldn’t wait to drive, some of us had been driving before we ever became licensed by the state to do so.

Still, each generation creates it’s own traditions and memories. Some of these shared here are mine. I know it was a tradition my brother to some extent also experienced. I know family members and friends younger than me experienced the same type Friday nights that I did.

Would I do it again? With my friends from then and knowing what we knew then and in that certain time and place, yeah, I probably would, at least one last time. It was a time and a circumstance, unique to a random few in the grand scale of life, where it was just what we all did, a part of who we were then individually and collectively and a part of our past we recall more with a grin because we experienced it than with a twinge of sadness because it's gone never to come back. Some then called it all a waste of time. Maybe it was. Some now can come to the same conclusion, all the while clutching their phone while playing Candy Crush or changing the world through a tweet and a hashtag. I just know when I look back now to remember those good times they hardly seem like a waste of time at all.