Kith & Kin

PLEASE NOTE: This essay contains events regarding physical trauma that some readers may find distressing. If that concerns you, please feel free to read no further. David was a quiet kid, well-behaved, intelligent; he was an eighth-grade student of mine many years ago. His face was rather pale; he had dark hair. His most notable feature was his eyes—they were large and dark and kind. I wonder whether they attracted members of the opposite sex as he grew older—I suspect they did. David, as students will, grew up and moved on to other things. He became a Marine and got married. I worked with him on a paint crew one summer (he worked year-round; for me it was just a summer job)—he was still kind and soft-spoken, but he was now a “beast” as far as his physique was concerned, thanks to the Marines. I couldn’t compare with him in the least when it came to strength. I have never had a lot of upper-body strength. Most of the other guys in high school PE could climb a rope or hand-walk do...

Our former home on Bartley Road, LaGrange, Georgia. We lived here in 1973 – 74. Author’s Note: This essay is absolutely not intended as a condemnation of all people who live in Georgia, of all people who live in LaGrange, or of anyone living there today. This is how things were for me fifty years ago. Although I don’t speak of them here, we met many wonderful people and made great friends back then. And I am sure that today the good people of LaGrange, like the rest of us, are very different from those I knew so long ago. It was 1973, and I was riding the bus home after my first day at Troup Junior High School in LaGrange, Georgia. Two boys about my age were a couple of seats behind me. “Hey!” one of them said. “Hey you!” I turned and looked at them hopefully. Maybe they would be friendly. “Where you from?” they asked. “Ohio.” They looked at each other and said, “Oh-Hi!” and laughed. “I bet you like Sherman, don’t ya?” one of them added. Now, the only “Sherman” I knew was ...