There’s a certain kind of memory that doesn’t knock. It just walks in, sunburned, half-dry, smelling like chlorine and cheap sunscreen, and takes a seat like it owns the place.
By Rob Reep
Saline River News
A year or so back, I wrote about the old Coke machines at Warren Junior High, the building that for my grandparents’ generation was the original 1932 Warren High School on Pine Street. It felt like a small thing at the time. A quick glance in the rearview mirror. But memory doesn’t work like that. You don’t get just one. You pull on a thread and suddenly the whole thing starts to come apart in your hands.
Lately, that’s been happening more and more.
Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s place. Or maybe it’s what happens when something you assumed would always be there quietly slips out from under you.
A few weeks ago, the announcement came that the Donald W. Reynolds YMCA pool would be closed this summer.
And before anything else, before the nostalgia and before the storytelling, it’s worth saying this plainly. That pool didn’t just exist on its own. It was carried. Maintained. Fought for, really, by people who showed up summer after summer and made it work.
Because pools like that don’t take care of themselves. Not in a place like Warren. Not sitting where that one sits, right there beside the Town Branch, in a flood-prone spot where water has a way of reminding you who’s really in charge. Add in the cost of chemicals, repairs, upkeep, staffing, all of it climbing year after year, and it doesn’t take much to see the strain.
We’re not talking about a large metropolitan YMCA with deep pockets. We’re talking about something much smaller, much more unique. I could be wrong, but I’ve heard it said before that Warren may be the smallest town in the country with a fully functioning YMCA. If that’s true, that’s something special.
But special doesn’t mean easy.
It means every dollar matters. Every repair matters. Every decision carries weight.
So no, there’s no judgment here. Not from me. If anything, there’s respect for the people who kept that thing going as long as they did. Because they did. Longer than you might expect.
And maybe something gets worked out down the line. Maybe this isn’t the end of it.
But for now, it is what it is.
And if I’m being honest, that’s probably why my mind keeps going back there.
Because places like that don’t announce their importance while you’re in them. They don’t tell you to pay attention because this is going to matter someday. They just exist quietly in the background of your life.
Until one day they don’t.
And that’s when you start remembering.
And just like that, I was transported.
Back at my home place on North Walnut.
Back when distance was measured in blocks instead of miles and a block and a half might as well have been your whole world. My boyhood home sat just a stone’s throw from the Y. Close enough that you didn’t plan to go, you just ended up there. These days I live next door on Bond Street, separated from it all by a fence and a few decades. I really got out and saw the world, didn’t I? But sometimes the story isn’t about escape. Sometimes it’s about orbit.
From about age five to thirteen, the Y wasn’t a destination. It was a constant. A fixed point in the chaos of summer. If it was hot, and it was always hot, you went.
A couple of years ago, I dug into a box of old VHS tapes, those clunky plastic time capsules that used to hold entire lives. My mom, Beverly, filmed everything back then. Not the highlight reel version of life we’re used to now. The real stuff. Long stretches of nothing with moments mixed in that didn’t seem like much at the time.
Until they did.
When I had them converted to digital, I noticed something right away.
The Y kept showing up.
Again and again.
It wasn’t just a place we went. It was where things happened. Where time passed in a way that felt substantial.
I’ve kept most of those videos to myself so far. Truth is, I never really planned on making them public.
They weren’t shot for that.
A lot of them were just for me and Dad. Something to pull out years later, sit down, and remember what those days felt like. The small stuff. The ordinary stuff that turns out not to be ordinary at all.
Now they mean something a little different.
Now they’re there for my two boys. A way for them to catch a glimpse of what growing up in the South looked like in the 90s. Before everything was recorded, before everything was shared. Just life as it happened.
And maybe that’s why I’m starting with this one.
Because it’s not just my memory. It might belong to a few of you too.
The first one I’m sharing is from late June of 1992. I would have just turned four. Swim lessons.
The footage drops you into a version of the Y that’s already gone, the second pool the place ever had. Not the original under the gym and not the one most people remember more recently, but the one in between. The one on the north end of the building near the Town Branch, roughly where part of today’s Y stands.
There’s a diving board that looks impossibly high when you’re that small. A covered pavilion off Main Street. And up above it all, that terrace where my mom was likely standing, camera rolling, capturing something she probably understood better than I did at the time.
The faces in the water are mostly strangers now. Time has a way of doing that. But one face stands out.
I’m almost certain that’s Memory Burks-Frazer teaching me how to swim.
And I owe her for that.
Because learning to swim isn’t really about swimming. It’s about that moment when your feet don’t quite touch anymore and you realize you’re either going to figure it out or you’re not. And somehow, you do.
That lesson travels.
It follows you into deeper water later in life, literal and otherwise.
The Y gave me that.
It also gave me birthdays.
A June 1 birthday in South Arkansas is a pretty good deal if you’re a kid. It guarantees one thing. Water.
And those days had a rhythm to them.
Hours in the pool chasing a basketball on that poolside goal, burning through whatever energy you had, the sun pressing down like it had something to prove. You’d get to that point where your arms felt like rubber and your legs didn’t quite belong to you anymore.
And then cake.
Too much of it, always.
Sugar and chlorine and exhaustion all blending together into something that made perfect sense at the time.
As I got older, the structure fell away. No parents organizing things. No schedule. Just a block and a half walk, a few familiar faces, and an entire afternoon to fill.
The deeper end was always a negotiation. You’d bounce on your toes just enough to keep your mouth above water, pretending you were comfortable before you actually were. Confidence on credit.
And then there was the smell.
You don’t forget that.
Those old shower rooms, thick with chlorine, heavy enough to taste. Probably unbearable to an adult. To me, it meant the day hadn’t even really started yet.
It meant freedom.
It meant there was nothing expected of you except to stay in the water as long as you could.
That pool’s gone now. Or at least this version of it is. The one people have known in more recent years, the third pool, is the one closing. The one in that old video, the second pool, has been gone a long time already.
Turns out this isn’t the first time that place has disappeared.
Maybe that’s the point.
Things like that don’t last forever. They change. They get replaced. They fade out and make room for whatever comes next.
But they don’t really leave.
They just relocate.
They move into old tapes. Into muscle memory. Into the way you still instinctively tread water without thinking about it. Into the part of your brain that remembers exactly how it felt to have nowhere to be and all day to get there.
And every now and then, if you’re paying attention, they come back.
Uninvited.
Pull up a chair.
And remind you exactly where you started.
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