A Part of a Family, Part I

Just after my seventeenth birthday, I was invited to live with a family that I had become friends with during the previous months. This change involved my leaving my own family in southern Oklahoma. They were willing to accede to this change because they saw in it a chance for my own improvement. I will never forget the morning I left the old home-place. I loaded my few belongings and said good-bye to my grandfather, my "Papa." He was not one to demonstrate his emotions, but his eyes were red-rimmed and full of tears when I hugged him and said, "Bye, now."

The young, for the most part, are oblivious to feelings, except their own, and I was no exception to this rule. I know now something of the pain the old couple must have endured and the loneliness of that remote old house in my absence. I now have pain and regrets over the many sorrows I caused them, including this one. But, this same oblivion is what makes the young adventurous and daring, and I was nothing if not adventurous and daring. I was ready for a new start, a new life!

The family I moved in with were a Christian couple with three young daughters. They had moved to another Oklahoma town to be the music/youth director in a Baptist church there. The plan was for me to live in a little cottage behind their church-provided home, but soon, I was ensconced as a member of the family in one of the three bedrooms in the house. This, itself, posed a hardship on the girls, who had to room together in a smallish bedroom. I mention this only to reveal yet another aspect of this family's generosity toward me.

What did they find when they began to discover who I then was? I was warm, personable, gregarious, full of fun. I was talented, gifted, bookish. I was also wild, undisciplined, impulsive, given to extreme mood swings. I could be kind and gracious one minute and carried away in a towering rage the next. In many ways, I was a mess. And, I do mean a mess!

The fact is, I had been on my own in one form or another all my life. After my mother's death, my father traveled the country with me in the front seat of his 1951 Ford sedan. I was thirteen months old. We crisscrossed the country together as he tried to literally drive out his pain and leave his grief behind him. But, pain and grief like his cannot be evaded; they met him whenever he arrived at a new place. Finally, he needed to go to work and he took me to his parent's home, the one I would leave on that November day in 1968. There I lived like a little prince for the next four years. After that, I went to live with my father and his new wife. The next years would be hell on earth, and a part of that hell would be the long hours that I spent alone, even as a small child, while my father and his wife worked. In that loneliness I developed my own inner-world, a world where I could escape, a world where I was king. I would from time to time invite others into this world, but I was always the leader, the defender of my kingdom, and the sole arbiter of that realm. This continued into my early teens.

When I reached my early teens, my life with my step-mother had become so abusive, and her marriage to my father so volatile, that my grandparents feared for my safety and sanity. They pleaded with my father to let me return to them on the pretext that my grandmother needed someone with her when my grandfather worked at his night watchman's job. My father resigned himself to this and I was back at the happiest place on earth to me!

The next two years were idyllic. I was free to roam at will the woods and hills of southern Love County, Oklahoma. I had several rifles and shotguns along with other woodsman's gear: a Hudson's Bay axe, steel traps, a backpack, knives and hatchets of all sorts. When not in school, I was in the woods and on the Red River, in all weathers and at all hours, hunting, trapping, fishing, and just being alone. I learned woodcraft from my grandfather and uncles, from books by Daniel Carter Beard and Ernest Thompson Seton, and from experience- watching, listening, smelling, tasting, touching the wild world. I shudder to think back at some of my exploits, so dangerous and daunting they were for a boy. I once made a trek, through nine or ten inches of snow, that went on for about eight or nine miles, looking for furbearers and their den-trees. I returned in the bitter cold as the sun was setting in the clear reddened sky, my pant's legs frozen like stove pipes from the knees down in the sub-freezing cold. But, I remember, too, the sense of achievement and pride I had in that trek and the joy of coming home to my Mama's hot cooking. I know now that, though they had worried about me, they were proud of me, too.

During this same period, I made friends with two brothers, Eddy and Lonnie Foster, who were also enamored of the woods and woodcraft. We were inseparable, but I was still the leader, though both were older by two or three years. Together, we hunted with hounds- coons, possums, anything with fur on it. We became accomplished at it and were admired in the community for it. Together we made a camp on the spring branch belonging to my grandfather, and at my insistence, built a log cabin on the spot from trees we felled ourselves, notched, and rolled into place. It stood for years on the spot until it rotted away. I still have photographs of it in ruins.

But, despite the friendship, I was often alone in the woods and on the River... thinking. "...and a boy's thoughts are long, long thoughts." My life, though social and in some ways, gregarious, was still an interior life, a life of thinking, reading, exploring, doing...alone. My grandparents were people of the land and of the woods, so they were content to hold their breath and pray, and let me go.

In my fourteen year, I fell in love with bluegrass and old-timey country music. At the same time, my youngest aunt had married a guitar picker who began to teach me to play. I went at it with the same savage, manic fury that I went at everything. My fingers bled from practice in those early days. Little by little I began to be proficient. When I was good enough, I began to play with older pickers and singers at home dance-parties. A child musician-singer is always a wonder to adults, especially one that can perform without nervousness before a crowd. I was such a child.

Soon I was playing at county "hootenannies" and with adult, accomplished pickers. I even started a band of my own called the "Midnight Ramblers." There were three of us, but I was still the leader. The band finally failed because of territory battles between an older member and myself. Finally, I began to play and sing with an adult group, whose leader had been a Nashville session musician. With adults, I was willing to "keep my place," so long as they did not place too stringent demands on me. During this time, my grandparents let me go wherever and whenever I wanted; they could do little else without having me incarcerated. I was willful and wild. I was also popular, with girls and with adults, especially after they had had a few drinks. My group began to sneak me into venues that were strictly adult- bars, joints, VFW clubs.

During this period, my grades suffered and I was often half-there in class because of my midnight ramblings. I adopted cocky, brash, and adult airs. Even those in my family who loved me found me insufferable. They were worried about the company I was keeping and about my time on the road. I couldn't drive and had no car if I could have, so I hitchhiked around the county and beyond. Well they may have worried, and did. They warned me, pleaded with me, and threw up their hands in exasperation. I was on my own- though they were there to feed me, clothe me, and shelter me... and, I now see, to love me. It was a horrible time for them. When I remember my treatment of them, I am full of wonder and shame. There was already talk of "going to Nashville" and making a music career. This was enhanced by the fact that I had already begun to write my own songs.

During this time, I was befriended by my high school English teacher, the Rev. Clyde B. Spann. He was intrigued with my intelligence and, I think, my aplomb. He encouraged my reading and my writing, which I had begun to do seriously. He also prayed for me and remained a true friend to me despite my arrogance and country brashness.

Things were coming to a head in my life and the result would be "wondrous strange," not just to those looking on from the outside, but, even more so, to me, myself.

To be continued...