Читать книгу One Day in May - Indiana University Press - Страница 6

FRIDAY, MAY 20, 2016, was a typical spring day in the midwestern state of Indiana. The sun rose at 6:25 AM in Indianapolis and 7 minutes earlier in Fort Wayne, where it would reach 70 degrees before the day’s end. It was a bright, sunny morning throughout most of the state; as the day progressed, clouds rolled in, rain fell, and nary a Hoosier spotted a sunset.

On the morning of May 20, 2016, the people of Indiana woke up—or came home from work—and got on with their day. The Greater Greenwood Lions Club began its spring garage sale at 9 AM. Items collected for months were sold by volunteers on the lawn in front of the Golden Corral restaurant. Two hours later and 43 miles south in Bloomington, food trucks pulled into the parking lots of the Chocolate Moose and Smith’s Shoe Center, and lucky post–academic year residents of Btown stopped by to purchase and enjoy some tasty lunches. At 3:30 that Friday afternoon, to the west, in Terre Haute, members of the Central Christian Church sold tickets to their forthcoming Holy Cow Drop from the church’s parking lot on Wabash Avenue. You simply had to drive up, pay $10 for a two-by-two-foot pasture square of your choice, and hope that the Holy Cow would do the rest and make you $10,000 richer. Looking south and moving into the early evening, the Evansville Country Club hosted “Night of Adventure: aMaze & aMuse,” an interactive fundraising event for adults featuring a zillion cool and undeniably eclectic things, including golf, a celebrity chef, a magician, an awesome dinner buffet and trivia competition, silent auctions, and—thank goodness—a cash bar. Way up north, and a couple of hours later, the 49’er Drive-In in Valparaiso opened its gates for its sixtieth year and offered a double-feature of The Jungle Book and Captain America: Civil War, beginning at 8:15 PM. For those more adventurous and soon-to-be hard of hearing, at about the same time, the heavy metal supergroup HELLYEAH rocked the stage at Pierce’s Entertainment Center in Fort Wayne, the latest stop in their We’re All in This Together tour.

Indeed, it was a normal spring day in the Hoosier State, paradoxically full of the mundane and mighty, surprise and same-old, all wrapped in routine. Cows were milked, eggs gathered, and some plowing got done before the rain. From Lake Michigan to the Ohio River folks biked, drove, or walked to work—or stayed home for their jobs. The last day of school for many children; the springboard into the weekend for most adults. The interminable construction and traffic delays on State Road 37 plodded on, while overhead, planes flew into and out of Indianapolis International Airport on time. Like every day, new Hoosiers were born on May 20, 2016, and for some, it was their last. But it was not an entirely typical day. On May 20, 2016, in Indiana’s two-hundredth year, Hoosiers chose to share their Friday together with the future. Hundreds across the state—and we mean everywhere—took photos that symbolized something meaningful about those twenty-four hours and sent them to us at Indiana University Press. After a considered (and sometimes agonizing) selection process, we settled on over 140 photographs from across Indiana that we felt best represented the slice of Hoosier life that was that Friday. To synchronize the entire state to the same time zone, we had to adjust the times of those handful of photographs taken from the extreme northwestern and southwestern corners by one hour. We also edited some descriptions a bit and added a few details here and there for clarification.

So, enjoy, reflect, and appreciate our state once again. Hey, not all the pictures are professionally impeccable . . . but they are real and stand collectively as the essence of Indiana, the blood and bones of what unfolded across the hours in that One Day in May.

Indiana University Press