The day the crazy kid brought a knife into our yard

Sometimes people have the luck to be in just the right frame of mind when a crisis arises.  OK, bad luck brings the crisis, but the right frame of mind can keep a disaster from happening, from becoming more than a momentary disturbance on a soft summer day.
Our Atlanta neighborhood was a quiet one most [...]

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The day Randy’s mother asked a key question

My friend Randy was a really nice kid and a natural leader–smart, focused, creative, bold, able, and he really knew how to present himself in a pleasing manner, whether to child or adult.  I was lucky to have known him, to be his neighbor, to be his friend.
As it turned out, he was a testament [...]

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The day Randy Robinson’s dog was killed by a car

Mutts are just the best, aren’t they?  That has been my experience, anyway.  One of the better ones I’ve known used to follow my group of childhood friends on the fishing expeditions we took all around our homes on what was then the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He was a small dog, mostly white with three [...]

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The day I looked up from baseball to find my teacher’s hospital room

This would have happened in the late 1950s, just after my fifth grade year at Andrew Carnegie Elementary School, in Tulsa, Oklahoma .  I loved it there–the school, my friends, the town, the ranches surrounding our suburban subdivision–it was just the ideal place for a boy to grow up.
Carnegie was a “pilot school,” one set [...]

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The day I ice skated on my front yard

Oklahoma has freakish weather.  It is known for being in Tornado Alley, but you don’t have to live through a tornado to experience some weather-related excitement there.  I have seen a hole the size of a Volkswagen blown in a roof by lightning.  I have seen a summer storm fill the gutters in a minute, [...]

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The day I made a bold move in the school cafeteria

Transferring schools is something I did quite frequently growing up.  I attended seven different elementary schools, in fact.  Transferring schools, especially at mid-year, can be disorienting under the best of circumstances.  They all have different rules and punishments, all have different things and people to be sought out and avoided.  It can take quite some [...]

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The day I spilled my milk in kindergarten

Kindergarten was a catch-as-catch-can affair in mid 20th century Atlanta.  It had not become part of the public school offerings at that point, but there were many options, most of them offered by churches as a way to glean some income from their unused space during the week.  I’m told that I transitioned into kindergarten [...]

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The day we kids showed our racial sensitivity

While we were living in Ohio, my father arranged for workmen to come and do some kind of work in the yard near the front of the house.  I was about three, so I have no idea what they were going to be doing, but I do remember my mother sitting my sister and me [...]

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The day the lawnmower got away from Grandma

Until I was four years old, we lived next to my grandparents just south of Lake Erie in Ohio.  My grandparents, Clare and Hazel, were union workers who always had some acreage under cultivation, always had a ranch house with a basement, and always had their basement full of shelves groaning under the weight of [...]

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The day my sister hit me in the head with a hoe

I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but we lived In Waterville near Toledo, Ohio, next door to my grandparents, until I was four.
I have mostly hazy memories of our time there, but a few experiences stand out, even after all these years.  One event leaves only vague impressions; instead of being a definite series of [...]

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