yep, ..............that's right,............as far as i can tell, ............i grew up in God's country!! i spent most of my childhood life in a place called sand mountain in Alabama. actually, i spent all my childhood life there. it wasn't until i became an adult that i was blinded by unrealistic dreams of life better somewhere else.
i really don't remember a lot of my childhood events, but i could not have ask to have grown up in a better place. i grew up on a country mountain. life was slow and easy. i can still remember things like the smell of bacon in the morning air.
the things that I'm about to say are not meant to be offence to anybody. it's just the way it was. i didn't cause it to be that way. it was just that way before i was even born.
everybody knew everybody in my small town. there were no city buses. if you car was broken down, and you needed to go anywhere, you just started walking. there was no need to stick your thumb out to catch a ride. since everybody knew you there were plenty offers for a ride. some folks would simply take you where you were going, no matter what their plan was to begin with. if you were headed to the grocery store somebody would take you, and shop with you then take you back home. the only people that ever stuck their thumb out was misplaced, and didn't understand a thing about southern hospitality.
i went to a school where every student in that town went, grades 1 through 12. the school bus would pick us up in the morning, and drop us back off that evening in the same place. if we needed to ride to a different place that evening, you had better get it straight with the driver that morning. the driver knew each one of us by name, and where we belonged.
i can't recall the trouble going on at school like it is today. did we take guns to school? well,...........yeah, but they weren't loaded,. we were just a bunch of rednecks showing off the guns that we owned. we were proud to have them, and everybody we showed them to looked with amazement, and not fear. i learned to shoot because of my buddies at school took the time to teach me. always at their house, in an open field.
i can't remember going to school without a pocket knife. back then we would do something that used to know as" whittlin.'" we would take a stick, and shave it down to nothing. sometimes we would play a game called stretch, and when we had a couple of risk takers, they would play mumble peg.
we never even thought about cutting anybody, little lone stabbing them. we fought all the time without doing any real damage to each other. at the first sign of blood we knew who the winner was, and before two hours had passed, we were better friends than we started out as.
my entire area was made up of white folks. we didn't have any other culture that lived there. I'm not really sure why, but i would guess that the elders kept them all run off. i never even saw a black person in person until i was nearly an adult. i wasn't taught to hate then either. a popular myth from my region. how could i hate something that i was never exposed to being around?
i know that there was the Klan active where i grew up. like i said before, they were there before i was born. i never heard of them lynching a person either. they just done their rituals. they must have had the easiest time hating a group of people that i had never seen.
i just set the background on my childhood. i can't possibly even get into the good times that i had coming up in this letter. there was so many that i couldn't possibly tell them all right now. i feel that this is important to allow y'all to understand a bit more about me.
i will continue to tell this story until I'm satisfied that I've let y'all into the heart of the man that has come to be know as Mr. illusion of confusion.
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