Tubing Down the James with Jim

Jim owned the small computer store in town. He was the only computer repair shop in the county, though business wasn’t great. I worked there after school and on weekends.

Jim taught me how to solder. How to fix circuits and low-level electronics. He taught me how to make things work with what you had on hand.

I ended up betraying Jim pretty badly in the end.
This isn’t that story though, that comes later… This was maybe one of the happiest memories of this era of my life. Possibly the only happy memory.

Jim had two children: Dale, who was just a year older than I was, and Kevin, who was in his early 20s at the time.

Dale and I were in Japanese class together. Like me, he was also bored with high school and enrolled in an early college program.

There was some drama with Kevin—he was dating a girl named Leslie, who was about the same age I was. Apparently, he was also dating her mother.
Country shit.

Sometime after this particular day—and not all that long after—Kevin committed suicide in the trailer Leslie and her mom lived in.
It was with a shotgun to the head.

But on this day, Jim, Dale, Kevin, myself, and a couple other friends went tubing down the James River.

We packed lunch and beers into coolers and headed to Scottsville, where the tubing outfit was.

It was such a nice, sunny day.
I was self-conscious about my body, so whenever I went swimming I kept a T-shirt on.

We’d dive in and out of the inner tubes, into the water of the lazy-moving river.
Fish would brush against our legs—it felt funny, but nice.

We came up to a shallow section of the river and beached our tubes to stop for lunch.

Jim had packed sandwiches for all of us.
Dale and I had been sneaking beers into our koozies the entire day.

I don’t think Jim cared much. We weren’t being obnoxious about it.

After lunch, we got back on our tubes and spent another hour or so floating to the pickup spot—another shallow bend in the river with a muddy beach landing.

It was one of the happiest days of my life at that point.
I owe a lot to Jim—for his tutoring, his patience, and the good moments he helped cultivate for me.