I wanted it so badly.

I’m guessing I was in the sixth grade. It could have been the seventh but I’m pretty sure it was the sixth. Living on a farm in central Kentucky and drowning in the feeling of isolation from the rest of the world, my imagination and black and white television offered a reprieve from the slow methodical passing of childhood. Now I’m almost certain it was the seventh grade, because I can associate this time period with my grandmother’s illness, and probably a year before she got really sick. I passed so much of my life in thirty-minute increments, and back then it was army shows, westerns, medical, and police shows. I didn’t cull out very many of them, but I preferred army and westerns. I spent a good deal of time imagining what it would be like to be in in that war, or riding that horse, hell, let’s call it what it was…. I was pretending. We had a store in the heart of town called The Big Seven, and it was just about Christmas, and right there in the window was something that caught my eye. I know this will sound like an ALDI’s version of A Christmas Story, but it is what it is so here I go…. It was a pair of toy six shooters and holsters, and I wanted them badly. I didn’t get them because everybody knew that I was too old for them except me, and they were right. A few months later my grandmother, who was already terminal with cancer, started getting bad, and childhood pretty much died. We all begin the process of growing up somewhere and I suppose this is where my beginning began. I never missed not having those guns, but I sure did miss not growing up with my Mamaw.

wayne.