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The Story You Tell Which Sticks

Kindred Spirits

“Anchoring,” going to a secondhand store, watching the boys play pool

Fathers

A green swing set, Mother’s Day cards, an afternoon of “Tosca”

First Kiss

At church camp, in a air raid shelter in wartime England, on an old flatbed trailer

Permission To Speak

One night as I lay in my crib, my tired mother, her patience spent, came into the room and stole my voice.

Kudzu Dreams

I was a child with a peculiar and passionate hunger for the peppermint in toothpicks when I went on a lion hunt with Opal Lavender, who was my favorite person and one of my own people.

Two Worlds

A left-hand turn; a dew-laced web; a piece of blue paper, folded once

A Dictionary Of Childhood

Because I had found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach.

William Butler Yeats,
Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1916)

The Priest Of Halfway

Enos had died that year, pathetically, and Jethro had seen in his eyes before they closed only relief that he no longer had to keep a parallel set of double-entry books for that God. That God was busy all the time, balancing numbers. Jethro had no desire for His heaven, and no fear of His hell.

Flying

We keep trying to find out. We look at the present and wonder about the past, about how we got here. It’s a question much asked; most people don’t think it’s possible to answer. But the answer is simple. It was Father.