I Walked Back Home.

I hadn’t been there in years.  But I was nearby and the bus was running toward where I used to live, so I said, why not, and I got on the bus and rode on over to where I used to live.  The house where I grew up was still the same, except it had been painted a different color and looked like the back wall had been burned off and replaced with some cheap fake kind of stucco wall like you can get at Home Depot, and I know about this sort of thing because I work at Home Depot and most of the stuff we sell is good, but some things, like the fake stucco, I wouldn’t have on my house, lemme tell you.  So, there I was, and the house didn’t look too good, and then out from under the house came crawling three or four dirty savage looking kids and they were running over toward me, and, heck, I didn‘t have any money, so I turned and the bus wasn’t all that far away. So I pushed the kids down and ran for the bus.  Lucky, I’m pretty spry for an old man and caught it down to the drug store and climbed on board.  I even used the bus bathroom to wash my hands in that weird bluish water.  But I didn’t get any diseases, thank the Lord. 

 My Dog Webster

I loved my dog.  He was a fine dog and he would run to me whenever I came home.  No matter whether I was gone five minutes or five days he would run up and jump up to see me, then bark until I petted him about the head and all four shoulders.  Not too long after that he would be at my feet staring up at me as if I was some sort of dog god.  And I suppose to a dog I did seem like a god because I was much taller than he was and I did provide the food, manna-like, for him, and even the water, unless he wanted to drink out of the mud puddle from on down the street which was always there no matter whether it was raining or sunny for a week or two; it was a mystery. 

Webster was always around and I liked it that way.  He barked when the maniacs showed up --broke out again from the halfway house down the street, and he even smelled the dead rat about two days before the rest of us noticed.  Webster was always around, until the day he wasn’t.  I can remember running out into the front yard and screaming Webster!!!  Webster!!!!! And I just knew something was wrong, he was always there.  That night my father came home and took me into the den and shut the door and even before he said a word I knew Webster was dead.  He took me by the shoulders and said, you got to be a little man, it’s time you was growd up enough to know all about life and death, and I’m afeared that death has took little Webster.  I tried not to cry, then I thought about Webster and how much scared he must of been right there at the last with the car bearing down on him, and I just started crying.  My father, he hugged me, then then when I kept on crying he threw me out the window into the azaleas and hollered out through the busted screen, now you got something to cry about, pansy!  I sorta turned to my mother after that.  

The Country Funeral

They didn’t just have open casket funerals where I was a boy.  Now, they had them, no doubt and some of the more unsightly people were sent on their way with a closed casket, but in my family, when I was a boy, at least on my mother’s side of the family, they sat them upright in the casket with a big smile sewed onto their faces.  Now sometimes that was difficult like with Aunt Betty who had the palsy.  She was a mess what with one side of her face drooping down like that.  So, they had to whiten up her mouth with lots of powder and then draw a big red lipstick smile running from the corner of one side of her mouth way up onto the side of her face heading up towards her eye.  Nearly took off her nose in the process, but wouldn’t anybody say much about it.  I did, and my cousin did, but we got told to shutup and when we pointed out how her mouth was mostly drawn on to my brother we got took out in the yard and whupped just to help reinforce the message.  But usual, it was a beautiful ceremony.  Going back as far as I can remember they used to gather things the deceased had written and spread that all around the casket.  Mama’s family was always educated, so it wasn’t embarrassing like it would of been in my father’s family, but even so, it wasn’t like they wrote books or something, and the letters and notes that they wrote were usually fine letters.  Then one family member wrote something that was supposed to be read when she was dead, and they put it out there, and that got something started and by the time I was 10 everybody was writing things right before they died if they knew thew were going to die.  When Uncle Theotis got caught up in the trash truck and got smushed, he didn’t have time to write anything, though passersby said his last words were not fit for recollecting in a church anyway.  So, her and her family started to going around and recording maybe not the last words somebody spoke, but maybe something they said three days before they died, and soon as it got cheap enough they started to make sound recordings, so now you go to a funeral and you got the dead person sitting upright and sounds like they’re talking to you because wasn’t a conversation from twenty five years ago, was from last week when they sounded like they sounded right before they died.  Creepy, actually, but they swear by it, and they all cry when they hear it again for the tenth time.