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Seems like we spend a lot of time dealing with trash. It’s everywhere and there is lots of it. I remember living over at Stonewall. “Take the trash out” meant taking it out to the burn barrel and sticking a match to it. This got rid of most of it as we sent the stinking stuff into the atmosphere to pollute the atmosphere. It was gone with the wind as far as I was concerned. Residue of ashes and other non-burnable gradually filling the barrel with ashes would be hauled off to the dump and you could start all over. Environmental damages? Not a worry for me.
Read moreI didn’t know that in order to leave one Baptist church and get into another (and keep your good standing) you had to walk down the wouldbe new church’s aisle, declare your intentions and instruct their church clerk to write your old church clerk a letter (on her own church’s stationery) and request this letter. Good heavens I thought after my mom had explained all this to me, I wondered what other secrets concerning wellbeing and heavengoing I hadn’t been told about.
Read moreJune long ago meant school was out. It was time to visit. To travel. It usually meant that my brother Gerald and I would be shipped off to our grandparents down in Leflore County to visit our grandparents and help out on the farm doing what my brother called “slave labor.”
Read moreI know looks aren’t everything. At least that’s what mama tried to tell us when we were living hand to mouth over in Centrahoma. Things went pretty well when there was just immediate family around, but someone always came back. You know, the refugees from the dust, the poverty, and foreclosing banks. Such as my uncle’s families from California who returned periodically to visit. Many people from the “dust bowl era” migrated someplace else for the simple reason most chances for being prosperous in the dusty environs of Oklahoma and surrounding states had gone down to about zero.
Read moreBill Cook has long been forgotten by the good people living over in Stonewall. But not by me. Who was this Bill Cook? Bill Cook was a famous criminal back about the time I graduated from Stonewall High School in 1952.
Read moreMaybe it is the weather that is doing it, but I can’t seem to get all warmed up this spring. The news last week says we are a full and complete whole degree Fahrenheit warmer compared to just last year but I have to go by what is happening now. All respect to Al Gore, I am cold. I am starting to be concerned that the flowers I put out this past weekend will even grow. My sonin-law’s garden has been completely frozen out (and abandoned) so there went “that” particular little avenue of pleasure.
Read moreIt was 1955 when I first saw this Marine Sargent. He served on my ship’s security detail, the USS Lexington, a carrier that fought in WWII. But it was on a Greyhound bus out of San Diego, California that I noticed he was going my way— east to Oklahoma. I had noticed he was quite a bit older than I and being on Christmas leave he was wearing his WWII medals and they looked pretty impressive. Getting on the bus I noticed there was one other sailor on board from the Lexington. A young black man. Like me, the other sailor had the usual small number of medals like all of the newer guys wore. Such as me.
Read moreWayne is out of pocket this week so we are running one of his columns from the past.
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