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 ...

My cousin Peggy is three years older than I am. We have been close ever since we were very small children and she dressed me up in little girl clothes like I was one of her dolls. As far as I know, only one photo exists of me thusly attired, which is one more photo than I wish there were of me thusly attired. I once told my mother that when I grew up, I wanted to marry Peggy. Grandma Swartz, standing nearby, reacted in typical Grandma Swartz style. “Oh, Stevie, you can’t marry your first cousin! Your children will be deformed! They won’t be right!” Mom’s wise reply: “For heaven’s sake, Mom, he’s only five years old! He’s not really going to marry her!” Why our children would be deformed was a mystery to me, but it didn’t really matter in the long run because Peg and I never married each other anyway. Peggy and I got to discussing birthdays once when we were kids, and we came to realize that I was born on September 22, and she was born on December 22. “We were both born on the...

Fredericksburg, Ohio, 2010. It was the mid-1970s. My first cousin Peggy and I were both teens, and we were standing together at the top of The Cliff. The Cliff bordered my grandparents’ property and overlooked a portion of the village of Fredericksburg. Someone once told me it was about 140 feet high, but in my memory it seems much higher than that. It was cluttered with trees of various girths and scrubby weeds and rock outcroppings all the way down, and its base disappeared into the shallow water of Salt Creek. Mom and Dad and the grandparents had one rule about the cliff: Stay Away From It! So, being compliant children (as all children were in the 1970s), we obeyed. Until we got somewhere they couldn’t see us. We kids had a secret hideaway called “the Cliff House.” It was really just a little indentation in the rocky cliffside that you got to by holding on to a small tree as you went over the edge and stepped into the indentation. Its floor was maybe eight feet from the edge...

Someone knocked over Grandma’s mailbox. My mother-in-law came home on a recent Tuesday afternoon to find that her mailbox, located in a neighbor’s front yard across the street, had been knocked flat. Our first assumption was that the trash truck had knocked it over, but a neighbor claimed he had seen a passing driver hit it. (This neighbor is an undisputed oddball, not known for his honesty, so we’ll never really know what occurred.) The mailbox and post were plastic, but inside the post was a two-by-four for strength and a four-foot length of heavy pipe for stability. Whoever hit the mailbox must have been traveling at some speed, because the pipe was bent ninety degrees where it entered the ground. Shopping Mom gave me cash and asked if I would purchase another mailbox for her, remove the existing wrecked one, and replace it with the new one. Being a dutiful son-in-law, I willingly agreed. Have you shopped for mailboxes and mailbox posts at Home Depot? There are approxima...

Why do dads tell Dad Jokes? I’ll tell you why. We think they’re funny. We really do. And we tell the same ones over and over again because we think that sometime, somewhere, someone is going to laugh at one of them. So the next time your dad tells a corny joke that he’s told you a hundred times, laugh uproariously at it. Fall on the floor and roll around if you’d like. Maybe he’ll figure that since that one finally got a laugh, it’s time to retire it. Or maybe not. Anyway, here are a few of my own illustrated Dad Jokes. LEGAL NOTICE If you hurt yourself falling on the floor and laughing at any of these, I absolve myself of all responsibility. Copyright 2023 by Steven Nyle Skaggs, Father

Weston Wills and Lorena Oretha (aka “Buddy”) Skaggs , my paternal grandparents, lived in Edmond, an unincorporated community southeast of Charleston, West Virginia. Grandpa was a godly man, not without a sense of humor, and he was born on August 29, 1901. In another blog post I referred to my Grandpa Skaggs’s “tough, rangy body battered by years of hard labor in the West Virginia coal mines.” That’s actually a pretty good description. He was tall and thin and bony. He had had a hard life, as many men did in those days, working in the coal mines at a job that risked his life every day. Somewhere along the way he lost his entire pinky finger and part of his index finger on his right hand. He ended up with black lung and cancer (which resulted in the removal of one of his eyes), so the mines really did eventually kill him. Grandpa worked for seven different coal companies between 1928 and 1960. Imagine working a job where you breathe in black carbon powder every day all day long, down...