Text: Wang Xiaojia
Figure: From the network
There were only two junior high school classmates living in the same city as me. A male classmate, a female classmate. It is very regrettable that the female classmate Xu Guiling left us four years ago due to illness. She and I had been reading together when we were fourteen or fifteen years old, and it should have been two small unsuspecting hair complexes, which were precious, so after she died, I often thought of her.
From the first to the second day of junior high school, Xu Guiling has always been a member of the recreation committee of our class. She has a lively and cheerful personality and can sing and dance. Wherever she was, there would be a silver bell-like laughter.
At that time, the school often organized some literary and artistic programs in which each class participated, and the main forms were mostly small choruses, big choruses and performance singing, etc. The students who participated in the performance were all selected by her. Although I basically had no acting talent, every time I could be selected by her, I felt that I was not ignored, and I felt a faint sense of gratitude to her.
A male classmate in the class, he always wanted to participate in such activities. But he is the left voice, and when the chorus is big and small, the tone he sings is always different, the voice is sharp and out of rhythm.
For the honor of the class, every time he gathered to practice songs, Xu Guiling pulled him out of the team without mercy, and when he dragged him, he was very reluctant and unwilling to come out.
In 1967, before we finished junior high school, we all went home. Then, some became soldiers, some became workers, and most of them worked in the family farms. Xu Guiling's father was a cadre of the town's government, and the whole family ate commodity grain, so she became a salesman in the food system.
Immediately after that, she married a worker who worked in a county-run coal mine, and soon followed her husband to Suxian County, where she was assigned to work as an accountant at the county health and epidemic prevention station, and gave birth to two sons.
In January 1968, I was also transferred to Suxian County. Immediately after that, the family also migrated from the Mengzhuang Mine in Xiao County to Su County. Because the communication was backward at that time, there was no mobile phone, and she did not know her home phone number, and she wanted to contact Xu Guiling, but she could not achieve it.
Who knew that my wife and I came back from the street that day and met Xu Guiling in an alley. Her home was in this alley. So he called us to her house enthusiastically, happily recounting his classmates, and her husband sat in front of me, drinking tea and smoking with me.
As she spoke, her wife smiled at Xu Guiling and said that since Xiao Wang came to Su County, she said every day how could she see Xu Guiling? Xu Guiling felt that there was something in my wife's words, so she said half-jokingly, Cut, if I could have looked at Xiao Wang back then, how could I get you? The wife laughed.
Actually, she lives very close to us, just across a road, diagonally opposite. After that, my wife and I sometimes took our children to her house to play, and she sometimes came to my house to visit, and the two families were moving around like relatives.
Xu Guiling has a strong sense of classmates. I often say in front of me, when will we find a few classmates to get together.
So soon, she contacted her classmate Song Guangmin, who worked in her hometown, and the few classmates she wanted to meet (most of them were female classmates) were notified one by one by Song Guangmin, and the place of the meeting was in the town.
That day, she found a small car and took me to the party, and at noon dinner, the classmates gathered around a large round table, and everyone talked and laughed, drank happily, and was so happy that they couldn't help themselves.
When the party was nearing the end, someone proposed to let Xu Guiling, a member of the Cultural and Entertainment Committee at that time, sing, and she was not polite, and she cleared her voice and sang, singing the old songs that had been sung in the past, although she was older now, but her singing voice was still the original taste, and she suddenly won the applause and applause of the students present.
Because she had diabetes and complications, after retirement, her health deteriorated, and she came to my house less often, and most of them visited her at her house. Since my family opened a small shop, I have even fewer opportunities to go. Sometimes, she let her young son use an electric car to carry, specially to the small shop with me to pull, pull for half a day, leave her to eat is not willing, and then call the younger son to pick her up.
One of our classmates is a male classmate who works in the family farm, named Yan Jianjian, who brings local specialties from his hometown to visit me and Xu Guiling every year, and most of them come to her house first, and then she arranges meals in the restaurant, and will definitely call me to accompany him. After eating, she accompanied the male classmate to deliver the things she had brought from the countryside to my house.
I sometimes walked and I could see her playing poker with a few elderly people at a small street wall not far from her house. His two sons are older, both have become families, and have children. Her husband is an attentive man, very fond of his grandson, and he takes care of him. Naturally, there is also the meaning of wanting to let his sick wife be idle and idle, so that she can have a good life and recuperate.
Xu Guiling's eldest son graduated from the military academy, and later, as a deputy regimental officer in a certain unit of the Nanjing People's Liberation Army, Xiao Shun's son took her to Nanjing to see a doctor that year, who knew that she went, it was a road of no return, and she died of illness at the eldest son's home.
That day, when I came back from the street and passed by the alley where Xu Guiling lived, I suddenly found that her door was full of wreaths, and people dressed in white filial piety were coming and going in and out of her house. This made me very shocked, and my heart immediately became heavy, so I went to her house to comfort her husband and asked what day to say goodbye to the body.
This unfortunate news, I told the male classmate Li Shengmin who lived in the same city in time. On the day of the funeral, I went with him to mourn and bid Xu Guiling a final farewell. In the days when I came back, her voice and smile have always been in my mind.
Suddenly, she had been away from us for five or six years. When I was practicing in the morning, I often met her husband walking, and we all had to stop and say a few words. I asked him if he was married again? He said that he looked at the couple for decades, and in recent years he refused the marriage introduced to him by some people, insisted on living alone, and kept the love affair with his deceased wife.
Yan Jianjian, a male classmate who lives in the countryside, came to visit me at my house this spring, and when he ate, when Xu Guiling was mentioned, he couldn't help but burst into tears.
Old classmate Xu Guiling, are you okay in heaven? If there is an afterlife, I hope we can still go to school together, live in the same city, and be neighbors, okay?