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Showing posts with the label Georgia

Keith

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Baby Keith. Mom ’ s idea of putting the baby ’ s age right in the photo was a stroke of genius. My mother often told me the story of the day she and Dad brought Keith home from the hospital. They laid him on the couch, and I, two-and-a-half years old, looked at him and said, “Where’s his mommy?” At some point thereafter I comprehended the fact that my mommy and daddy were also Keith’s mommy and daddy, and that meant we were brothers. When we were still quite young, Keith and I had our own TV program. It was broadcast every evening immediately after supper. The two of us would go into the living room, stand in front of a large mirror, and put on a comedy show. Its high-brow humor consisted mostly of two little boys dancing around and acting silly, the larger one repeatedly hitting the smaller one on the head and pushing him off camera because he had made a comment that was, in the estimation of the larger one, stupid—while the smaller one gamely played along, always smiling, willingly...

Riding the School Bus in Jaw-juh

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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 ...