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I used to think it was a habit only a few people had. And I didn’t give it much thought. Now I do. Now I think it’s incredibly common.  We all have nonstop talkers in our “life space.” Like the  neighbor down the street. You try to avoid the guy if you see him out…

When we arrived in Boston, our task was to find the train that would take us on up to Exeter. However, we had at least two days before I was to make my formal appearance at the Academy. I knew that, once we arrived there, I would have to say good-bye to my friends and…

Our first stop of any duration was Washington, DC. None of the three of us had been to a city of such size, and certainly not to one as important as our nation’s capital. As the train wended its way through the countryside of northern Virginia, our anticipation of what we might encounter grew rapidly.…

Before I knew it, the day of our departure had arrived. As you might imagine, there was all manner of fuss and bother about getting to the train station in Greenville with an entourage of family members and baggage. And there were tearful good-byes and instructions about behaving ourselves, and not doing things that would…

The Motorola crackled and I heard Joe’s voice, “Jake, you got your cell on?”             “I do.”             ‘I’ll call you in a second.”             The ring tone on mine sounds like the old rotary phones they had back when I was a kid. “Whoa! I gotta adjust the volume on this contraption,” I said…

It was about 10:30 in the morning on New Year’s Eve day. She was maybe four feet tall. Rolling a cue ball back and forth on the pool table in the old gym where us grown ups were playing pickleball. “Hey, sweetheart.” “Hey. My name’s Regina. What’s yours?” “Hi, Regina. I’m Virgil. Nice to meet…

My impulse was to immediately tell Jared and Horatio about Exeter. But I resisted that impulse in favor of some some discussion with Uncle Chester. He was not really an uncle. But no one ever called him anything else. He was an old black man of indeterminate age who lived by himself a few miles…

As I moved into my early teenage years, I was to confront what almost all boys of that age must confront. Members of the opposite sex – not as mothers and aunts and sisters and schoolmistresses and annoying and confusing schoolmates – but as objects of romantic affection and (there is no easy way to…

One day, about three months after the accident, Jared and I had ridden Augustus (bareback of course) into the little town of Tilson, located some 10 miles from my home. Because of all the northerners who had arrived in our region to profit from Reconstruction (what a badly chosen term that was), the town was…

After 1865 the Deep South was a paradise for boys like me who love guns and other devices that explode. There were three of us who would go hunting for these monstrous things whenever we could escape our chores and schoolwork. One boy was Jared, a strapping lad of almost six feet even when he…