Boyhood

You are a boy. You notice how pleasant it is to breathe. The smell of bluebonnets is in the air. The heat is pure. You taste a cherry popsicle. The grass in the field is mowed and it is flat, and you cannot see where it ends. You hear the buzz of bumblebees. You hold your wooden bat. It feels solid. You dream of hitting the ball over the endless field – like Roy Campanella. You are riding your red Schwinn bicycle. You have bought 20 baseball cards and the latest Chip Hilton novel. You are going to go home and organize your cards. You have hundreds, but you don’t have enough. Tonight, you will begin Chip Hilton and finish by the end of the weekend. The book is called Fence Busters.

You stop to get a hamburger. It costs 25 cents. The tomato is fresh and the patty is thin and grilled. The hamburger is delicious. The coke is 6 cents and you remember people complaining when a coke went up from a nickel.

You sometimes think of God, but never when you are in church. In church, you think of getting out of church. You think of girls and wonder what they think about and why they make you feel so strange to yourself. You have friends, but no one knows you like you know yourself and you hardly know yourself at all.

You go fishing in the park. You catch perch with worms. The fish look scared. You carefully unhook them and throw them back. Your mother asks you why you catch fish just to throw them back.

You go to the local library. You are well known to the librarian, and she is happy that a boy reads so much. You read science fiction, westerns, biographies of historical figures and sports heroes, novels like Call of The Wild, mysteries, and adventure tales.

Somewhere in all of this, you realize you cannot be dreamy any longer. You no longer will be left alone because the world does not tolerate that. You must do something. You have to make money. Perhaps you could write about your feelings and thoughts, but who would pay for that? You don’t need much, you could live in poverty, but the thoughts about girls are more urgent now and though you know only a little bit about them, you know that they will not readily live in poverty. The more space your personality takes up, the more likely they are to notice.

So, you go to college so you can go to law school. Lawyers are on television shows and people seem to be interested in lawyers. You cannot take an old car apart and put it back together again, but you can read and you can write and you can argue with people, sometimes effectively for a young person.

You pack up your dreamy life and put the dreams into boxes in the attic.

You put on the harness and begin to practice law. It is not a bad life. Trial law is like poker, but harder. You are not bored and sometimes you exhaust yourself in a cause. Like in any competition, bad things happen, but good things happen too.

People want to loan you money. You are astounded that anyone would want to loan you money. People want to sell you fine clothes. They want to sell you vintage watches and second homes and foreign automobiles.

You do not really understand any of this, but you now take up a big space and people defer and call you “Counselor” or “Colonel” or “Sir.” They make way. You may have debts, but that is because people take notice of you and are confident you are good for it. You assume they are right.

In all of this, you begin to see something. You have lost much of what gave you life. You wasted so much in trying to be invulnerable, omnipotent and like God, you forgot what it is to be human, the thing you first knew on this earth.

There were always interruptions, side attractions really – things and events and people that amused or intrigued you. You now see that these were essential things, things connected to what you packed and put in the attic.

These essays are my effort to go back into the attic and unpack those things.

LAGNIAPPE

LETTER TO A GREAT GRANDCHILD

You are not here, and you don’t know me. You probably will never see me and if you do, you likely won’t remember it. I wanted to leave something of myself to you. After all, through you, a little bit of me is still alive.

I was born in Houston, Texas in 1946. I know it is hard to believe that anything could have happened that long ago, but it is the truth. There are many great things about Texas. I always loved Texas football, especially the Rice Owls, who played in a 70,000 seat stadium no more than two miles from my house. I could easily bicycle there and often did; my first job was selling cokes inside the stadium. I could buy the coke for six cents and sell it for a dime. I still remember Rice football greats like King Hill, Buddy Dial, and Frank Ryan. It is no small thing to have immortals live and play so close to your home.

I remember the barbecue. There is no barbecue like Texas barbecue. In the Deep South, barbecue sauce was used to cover the scent of questionable pig meat. In Texas, a steer was slaughtered on the Chisholm Trail in order to feed the cowboys and was cooked over mesquite. Texans don’t care for sauce over their barbecue.

Texas was a somewhat prejudiced place. I never could understand how you could call people bad names because of the color of their skin or their religion, but Anglo Texans made exceptions to their prejudices when food and sports were involved. Texans just could not get enough Mexican food – tamales, cheese enchiladas, beef tacos, jalapenos, yellow rice, queso, refried beans, corn chips, flour tortillas… I remember how delicious these foods were and how happy my parents and their friends were when they ate Mexican food, especially when chased with a Pearl beer. It would never occur to Anglos in Texas to call the families that owned those restaurants bad names; these people were their friends.

I remember the great Earl Campbell of the Houston Oilers. Texans loved Earl Campbell and did not even see that he was black. He was just “Earl.” He made Texans feel proud and excited when he ran over Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints and New York Giants. He looked for tacklers to run over and he paid a heavy price later. He paid the price willingly so he could be the best ever. When he scored a touchdown, he did not wiggle and dance; he handed the ball to the official. He had done it before. He was a man of great dignity. Everyone could see that.

I loved baseball and especially Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson and Don Newcomb of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I loved Pee Wee Reese and Sal Maglie and Clem Labine and Carl Furillo and Duke Snider too, and once I loved that team with its African American stars, I could never be prejudiced though I was surrounded by prejudice. I sometimes felt odd that I was not prejudiced but was never tempted to change my mind.

I saw Martin Luther King’s 1963 I Have a Dream speech on television during the March on Washington – a massive gathering of people on the Mall in Washington D.C. I was stunned as I walked through the room and stopped to listen. He was mesmerizing. No one had ever told me a black man could speak like that. I decided that I had not been told the truth about black and brown people and never again listened to supporters of white supremacy.

I also loved books. I haunted the library when I was six or seven and always brought home the maximum allowed – eight books. I read fiction, westerns, sports, history, and science fiction. I was interested in everything. I remember reading Call of the Wild by Jack London. I was probably too young to understand that book, but I loved it anyway. Jack London knew boys would love Buck and would try to plow through it, as I did.

I read Black Beauty, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, every Chip Hilton sports story I could get my hands on, Willard Price’s adventure stories, the Hardy Boys and the horror stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Books expanded my life span and my geography. I could read about any time and any place, so I was not limited to the years that have been given to me and the place where I lived.

Once I got a biography of Wyatt Earp from the children’s section of the library. In that book, Wyatt was always a good, peaceful man and never did anything wrong. I also noticed a book about Wyatt Earp with the exact same dust cover in the adult section, so I checked that out too. At first, I was disappointed and surprised to learn that he and Bat Masterson ran saloons and places where loose women lived and worked. They were gamblers. He tracked down and killed in cold blood the men he suspected of killing his brother, Morgan. Sometimes he killed men for less understandable reasons. He and Doc Holliday baited the Clanton gang into the fight at the OK Corral and three of the outlaws were slaughtered.

After a while, I was glad I read the book. I did not want to be patronized because I was a child. I wanted the truth. I also saw that Wyatt Earp did good things though he was sometimes a bad man. That is something I have always remembered, and it was a more realistic view of famous men for a boy to take.

I also remember my baseball cards. The purpose of the cards was to sell gum, but the gum was old and tasted bad. Boys wanted cards with pictures of their heroes and their statistics. It was exciting to open the package and hope to get Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Yogi Berra, Ernie Banks, Whitey Ford, Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, Stan Musial or Warren Spahn. The 50s were a Golden Age of baseball and there were so many Hall of Famers playing then. Like a lot of boys, my baseball cards went missing during my teenage years. I suppose my parents thought I had outgrown them and they were just taking up room. In truth, I seldom gave them a thought until much later when I found out how valuable they had become. I now collect baseball cards with my youngest son, Thomas, and to get my Hall of Fame cards back costs several hundred times more than they did when I was a boy.

I was sad sometimes. I remember when I was about six or seven, I heard on the radio that a man and his wife were going to be executed at sundown. They were probably the Rosenbergs who were executed in 1953 for being Russian spies. I remember riding my bike at sundown and thinking these poor people are dying now and no one can do anything about it. I did not understand how the government could just kill people and take this life away from them.

I played baseball as much as I could. I wanted to be a major leaguer, but though I had good speed, I was not all that good at any other part of the game. That is a regret for me, but my young son Thomas is a great baseball player and I sometimes can imagine playing that well, though I never did.

I later became a lawyer, and it was the perfect profession for me, perhaps the only profession. I could be my own person without a boss. I could argue and read and talk and think. I also helped people. Like Wyatt Earp, they sometimes did bad things, but I could see they were still people who needed my help. I liked to compete to see how good I could be, but in truth I never took much pleasure in beating someone. When I did, I never bragged about it, just like Earl Campbell.

I have thought a lot about life since I am old now. The most important thing in life is to act with courage. Many people don’t want you to have courage. A lot of things around you are designed to take your courage away. Most people want you to be obedient, not brave; it can be dangerous to have courage. Nothing though, is worth that empty feeling when you should have acted with courage but did not.

I was ambitious and wanted people to like me. It is in fact a great thing for people to like you and want to help you, but take care that it is you they like, not some caricature of you that you have created. This is not easy because a person is many things. It is possible, though, for the better part of you to have a core of beliefs and values and strengths. Don’t worry about the rest. No one can be entirely pure or always right, and you should forgive yourself for failing. The answer is not to be sad and dislike yourself; the answer is to do better.

I spent much of my life trying to preserve my position, my property, my money, my status. I regret that. Every day you are going to get better or worse. You will never stay the same. It is better, though harder, to get better. In fact, the main difference between good and bad is that bad is easier.

I am sure you will figure these things out better than I did. No one goes through life without pain, mainly because we want more life than we can get. The pain is not that important and if you do not panic, there are lessons in pain that will make you wiser.

I never had much to do with the churches, but I spent a great deal of my life thinking about God. I doubt there was any choice in that because I was perplexed at being mortal and tried to understand why I was here and why I must leave. Heaven might be perfectly fine for some, but I wanted to stay here. The times when I had the most satisfaction, I was not thinking of God or myself at all; I was thinking about the things of the earth.

Earth is beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful place in the universe. People have to work and use the resources of the earth, but you should encourage people to be wise stewards so your great grandchildren can also see the earth’s majesty.

As stated in Ecclesiastes, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.”

Well goodbye now. I feel better having written all of this down and I thank you for inspiring me to do it. I hope that your life is interesting and puzzling and magical.

Your Great Grandfather,

Randolph