The day my dog saw an alligator

Freddy was not my dog; I mean, I didn’t own him.  We had not arrived at any such contractual arrangement.  I can’t imagine that I could have made the terms attractive enough for him, and I don’t think the nature of our relationship would have benefitted in any case.  Rather, he sort of came with [...]

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The day of the epic dog fight

I was living on a dairy farm near Chapel Hill, NC, when the animal protection folks came by and asked if I would mind keeping one of their dogs for a while–y’know, to keep it from being killed and all.  Under the circumstances they laid out, I couldn’t think of a reason why I couldn’t.  [...]

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The day the mason threw up and kept on working

One summer late in high school, I worked with a brick mason as his “tender.”  Being this particular mason’s tender was sort of like assisting a surgeon, except I was constantly filthy and had to mix bags and bags of mortar in addition to moving and stacking a ton of bricks in an average day.  [...]

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The day I broke down on the floor of the dressing room after the state championship game

In Atlanta in the late 1960s, soccer was not exactly popular.  Neither were the people who played it.
I take that back.  The soccer players at North Springs, my old high school, did all right socially, but not solely because we played a particular sport as happened with the football and basketball players.  We labored in [...]

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So true

I am out of the memoir mode for the moment.  I happened to see this quote from Mohandas Gandhi in A.Word.A.Day today:
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948).
Given the experience of my last few years, and the insight I have gained into some of the people [...]

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The day we painted George Wallace’s campaign billboard

In 1968, my junior year in high school, George Wallace took part in the presidential election as a third-party candidate.  He took several southern states in that election, and living in Atlanta at the time, one saw his campaign posters all over town.  This sort of inflamed my nascent political passions and those of my [...]

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The day I baffled the bully

One of the many elementary schools I attended was populated with some real special characters.  This was an Atlanta elementary school, and I was there for sixth and seventh grades, right before going to high school the way we did in those days.
We had our “early maturing” types who developed secondary sex characteristics–and primary sex [...]

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The day I punched Buck Blalock in the stomach

Seventh grade isn’t tough for everybody–just the geeks.  Of course, most seventh graders are geeks, at least intermittently.  I was one of the geeks more often than I would have liked, so I should know.
Seventh grade was tough as hell for me.  It was tougher for Buck Blalock.  He was a big, doughy kid in [...]

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The day I took two doves that all the others had missed

Just about the only pleasant activity I got to engage in with my Dad growing up was hunting.  One should keep in mind that this was the 1950s and 60s, and people had not developed some of the attitudes about hunting they have today.  The game was there for the taking in those days, too.  [...]

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