When it is the 1950s and you are five years old, the son of a sharecropper, when you are an adventurous little kid, when the occasional whack of a hickory stick against your behind does not deter you from ignoring your mother’s instructions … sometimes you might take things a little too far.
I was that five-year-old kid.
Read MoreI can remember a beautiful morning, walking through the park, birds singing, sun shining. On that day a woman approached me from behind. I heard her and turned, then stepped off the path out of her way. She wore sunglasses, with head down, hat pulled over her forehead, some sort of music blaring into her ears through tiny headphones. She was speed-walking or something like that. She did not acknowledge my presence, just sped past me, as though I was not there.
I stood beside that trail, feeling sorry for her, as she hurried out of sight. On this beautiful morning out in nature, her total focus was on something else. Every single thing that I experienced, things that pleased my eyes, pleased my ears, pleased all my senses … she probably didn’t even notice them. I thought to myself, she could have gotten everything she wanted from that walk on an exercise bike in her home, and would not have had to drive to the park.
Read MoreWhen I was six years old, my father gave up farming on our little sharecropper's farm and got a factory job. We moved a few miles down the road to an old frame house with a tin roof, with the new luxury of running water. The house had a dirt front yard and an outhouse in back. It was a white house, sorely in need of paint, with a crumbling gray-colored front porch, a house quite close to the paved country road but surrounded by forest on three sides. Although small by today’s standards, it was a mansion compared to the three-room shack where I spent my first six years.
Read MoreAs I walked into the room I saw the paper in his hand. He looked up. The expression on his face was new to me.
"Did you write this?"
"Yes, I did."
"Is it about me?"
"Yes." I smiled.
Read MoreCan you imagine if this building was not property of the park, but instead, your vacation home? Imagine waking up to nature’s display of swirling clouds, lifting fog, swaths of the mountain lit up by the morning sun as clouds roll past it. What a morning, what a life that would be.
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