Part XIII

Summers in Arkansas are hot and wet. We lived in Ft. Smith which borders Oklahoma on the East side of the Arkansas River. Here in Colorado, that river is a nice easy river with some wide rafting areas and some pleasant flowing areas. If memory serves, in Ft. Smith it is a raging torrent. During the summer there are Cicadas, these beetle like bugs which make a loud croaking noise. There are June Bugs with their metallic green sheen which were a delight to a young boy's mind. There were fireflies at night, buzzing through the air like fairies, magically producing a small light as they fly. I still think one has not lived if one has not beheld the beauty of the bugs of summer. All my life I had thought that bugs were disgusting, but in Fort Smith, there were bugs of such great beauty that I found them intoxicating.

I slept on a couch in the living room of Granny's house. Couches were my bed in many of our houses, and I still find it easy to fall asleep on one. Moving to Fort Smith, we quickly realized that the type of contemporary church we had attended in LA was not to be found in Fort Smith. We began to attend two churches, both Baptist. That summer, I went to my first ever Vacation Bible School. They did "sword drills" where the fastest to find a passage won an award, but since I knew nothing about the bible really, I felt inadequate and awkward as I fumbled through the exercises. No one helped me and the kids looked at me with a mixture of sadness and disdain which screamed to me that I was a heathen. We only went to church for about 5 or 6 weeks and then Mom's experiment in Christianity was over. Everyday, Granny watched the Christian Broadcasting Channel (or whatever it was called). She loved her some Pat Robertson. I found the churches we attended in Arkansas and the TV which Granny watched to have the same shallow, cardboard, pasty-white feel that still turns me off in some circles of Christianity today. The kind of faith which allows one to judge and criticize others, call yourself a lover of God and people and yet still hold on to generational racism. It did not make it easy to see God through all the faults of His people.

In early June, a Boy's Club opened down the street. They had ping pong and air hockey and foosball. They had different sports and I finally got to take martial arts classes semi-regularly. In this case it was Judo, but we could not afford the uniform (gi) so I only trained for the summer. All of my friends went to Boy's Club and we had a blast. In the fall we all tried out for tackle football together. I was not as successful in that program as I had been in other programs. I probably screwed around too much.

On one trip into Oklahoma, we went to a slaughterhouse and bought fresh pork rinds. Real pork rinds (no the kind you buy at the supermarket) are fried pig skins and fat. They are delicious and disgusting all at the same time. Southern food in general is disgusting in theory but wonderful once you get by the idea of it. It came from extreme poverty, all of it. That is why Collard Greens and Kale are for decorating a dish in most of the world, but for eating in the south. Grits are the left over portion when other people get the corn. Whatever one can make from the unused portions of regular society's food can be called good southern cooking. In many areas it is now considered a delicacy. I am not kidding. On the same trip into Oklahoma, I found a tortoise in the desert. It was a box tortoise, but I don't remember its name. I left it inside a cardboard box in Mom's datsun on a 100 degree day when we went inside to play and it cooked. I buried it behind Granny's house.

In August, I began 6th grade. 6th grade was a blur for me in a couple of areas and clear in others. I had been in glee club at Burbank Elementary in LA, and now I was asked to sing in a special group. I got my first real lead in a play. It was one of those teacher-written, pathetic excuses for drama which one can find in any elementary. It was about economics. In 1978, paddles were still used in Arkansas schools fairly liberally. Our principal always gave out a maximum of 6 swats, no matter how many kids were involved. The paddle was a huge wooden job with holes drilled into it to cut up the wind-resistance and we figured her arm could only swing 6 times. So, it was with some reason that when we went to throw clay at the bathroom windows, we did it in a group. It was neither the first nor the last time I would receive swats, but it was memorable because we did wrong with the right number, 6 kids. We each got one swat and laughed about it later.

During this time my Mom started dating some guy named Larry. He was a greasy trucker type. I always remember him wearing the kind of hunter's ball cap which one might see in a parody of the south. If you were my mother's 4th husband....you just might be a redneck. They married in November and we moved to a nearby town of Greenville and I changed schools again.