Chapter Thirty-Four.

     So, I've decided to publish the last three chapters of the book before I officially turn 50. And since I officially turn 50 next Sunday, I should probably get after it.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Music and Mom

 Eight years ago, at the age of forty, I picked up a guitar and decided to learn how to play. I’d been regretting for years not having learned to play guitar when I was a kid, back when my mind was still malleable enough to soak up that kind of learning, and I didn’t have to work a job, pay bills, pay taxes, keep the fucking car in running condition, or worry (too much) about where my next meal was coming from. I also didn’t know then (as I know now), that most of the guys in my high school who did play guitar only knew three fucking chords. But those three chords were getting them noticed. By girls. Pretty ones. Those three chords were also getting them laid, by many of those same pretty girls. This was, naturally, the most closely guarded secret in the halls of my high school. If word had gotten out that taking just ten minutes to learn three chords yielded, like, ten thousand songs, every non-athletic dude in Montgomery County would have been buying, borrowing, or stealing a guitar, just to have a shot at getting into the Jordaches of that girl in class that they sat behind and fantasized about for an entire period.

     But it turns out that, for me, playing guitar was (and is) another artistic endeavor for making shit up. I was way too old (and married) at forty to start playing guitar solely for the purpose of getting laid, but I did learn something about myself that was kind of a surprise: I like making music way more than I ever liked acting. I’m not nearly as good at making music (I’ve been acting professionally all my adult life), but I have been picking, plunking, and strumming for eight years now. So while I’m never going to be Jimmy Page, or John Mayer, or even “Weird” Al Yankovic, I am turning into a pretty good Larry Brantley, who sings and plays guitar with his band, McKinney Root. Don’t look for us to be touring through your town any time soon. There’s only three of us, we’re all middle aged (except for my upright bass player, who is technically north of middle aged, but never acts like it), and we all have families and full-time jobs. (Actually, I really don’t have a full-time job – meaning a job I have to go to, and work forty hours a week, and fill out a time card and Incident Reports, or attend Sensitivity Training. For which I am profoundly grateful.) My point is, we like playing music together, but we also like going home after 10pm on a Friday night, to sleep in our own beds and beg for sex with our significant others. (I’m speaking only for myself in that last sentence. Mostly.)

     In music, as in every other creative undertaking I’ve ever had, I’m a collaborator. Yes, I could probably make a few extra bucks playing wine bars and restaurants and coffee houses as a solo act, but making shit up is just so much more enjoyable for me when I’m doing it with other people. I’m a huge fan of creating something that requires other people with skills and talents I don’t have. Technology being what it is today, I know people who are their own one-man bands, using foot percussion and looping and harmonizers to sound like more than what they actually are: a guy (or girl) sitting on a stage, spending more time pushing buttons than actually singing or playing an instrument. Mick Fleetwood, interviewed in the film Sound City, said it best: “The down side [of music technology] these days is thinking that, ‘I can do all this on my own.’ Yes. You CAN do this on your own. But you’ll be a much happier human being if you do it with other human beings. And I can guarantee that.” That’s coming from a guy who has been making music with essentially the same group of friends (Fleetwood Mac) for 37 fucking years. Pay attention, young people.

     I believe the reason I enjoy making music more than acting is twofold. First, making music feeds my need for instant gratification, the pure joy that comes from playing the right note, at the right time, and hearing my friends and me sync up a harmony that has been eluding us, and suddenly it’s there, and we all hear it. You don’t need an audience for that. You don’t need the appreciation of anyone other than the guys and girls you’re playing with. It’s not quite an orgasm, but it’s fucking close. Secondly, I’m much more willing to be vulnerable while singing and playing than I ever have been as a character on TV or in film. You’ve no doubt heard interviews with actors who say they are able to “lose themselves” in a role. I have never been able to do that. Not once. In twenty-three years of creating characters, whether they ran for years on a TV series, or just thirty seconds on a commercial, I was always on some plane of existence where I was still Larry. Most of the characters I ever played never required a ton of vulnerability, but any acting coach worth a shit will tell you that the first thing you must learn to do, if you wish to be a real, honest-to-motherfucking-goodness actor, is let go. Let go of yourself, your ego, your hang ups, your fears, blah blah blah. I could never do it. Still can’t. I don’t really need to completely let go of myself to be funny, and since funny is mostly what I’ve done in my career, I’ve been okay with it.

     Making music is the one artistic space in the universe where I can truly say, “Fuck it,” and let everything go. That doesn’t make me a great musician, or even a competent one. But it does make me honest. I’ve had dozens of pictures taken of me over the last few years while playing with the band, and I find none of them very flattering. But I do find them honest. I make faces when I sing certain songs that, taken out of context, might lead you to believe I was in the process of shitting a porcupine. I don’t care. I have no affectations on the music stage, because I simply don’t have the bandwidth for them. I’m too busy trying to not fuck up the song; I have no time to think about trying to look cool.

You totally thought I was kidding about the “shitting a porcupine” face, didn’t you?

     Since I picked up a guitar eight years ago, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of musical talent where I live in North Texas. Some of those talented folks even call me a friend, and have given me lessons, tips and advice here and there, that has improved the quality of my playing. But only one person gets all the credit for getting me started singing in the first place, and that’s Brenda Patrick Brantley Cook. Also known as “my mom.” I know I’ve said some unflattering things about my mom in these pages, even if they are true, but I believe in giving credit where it’s due. Mom was a hell of a singer back in the day. She was even part of a radio show back in the Sixties and early Seventies. The Hillcrest Baptist Church in Austin, Texas was one of the first to start recording sermons and music for later broadcast on the radio. Mom was part of a trio of singers that provided the music for those churchy programs. The trio was known affectionately as “God’s Golden Gigglers,” for their propensity to start snickering at something or other during each week’s taping, which led to giggling, which often proceeded to full-tilt howling laughter. Evidently the more the pastor and the audio engineer would try to get the girls back on task (they were, after all, singing traditional hymns – not exactly light-hearted fare), the worse the giggling would become, until everything had to shut down long enough for the cackling trio to wear themselves out. This happened, I’m told, almost every single week for the better part of nine years.

     I first started singing in church, because that’s where Mom was singing. Shortly after we moved to Conroe, our family joined the Mount Calvary Baptist Church, a tiny white clapboard chapel with a gravel parking lot, an out-of-tune piano, a reverend’s wife who could play a mean accordion, and a congregation mostly left over from the Civil War. Mom would often play the piano to accompany the choir, and one Sunday during service, while Mom was at the piano and the choir was giving hell to “The Old Rugged Cross,” I got up from my pew, walked over to stand beside Mom, and started singing harmony with her. I was, years later, told by some family friend or other that the general belief was that, at that moment, I’d been filled with the Holy Spirit, who had at that exact second given me the ability, not only to sing, but to sing harmony. The plain truth is, I liked the sound our voices made when she was singing one note, and I was singing a different one, but they somehow blended. After that I’d pretty much stand beside the piano every Sunday that Mom played. I had no real understanding of the words I was singing; it was the sound we were making together that thrilled me.

     Mom would spin me records from The Bill Gaither Trio, The Heritage Singers, even the Oak Ridge Boys. It was all a little hokey for me, even at that age – but it taught me to love harmony. We’d listen to tracks over and over, and she’d teach me how to pick out parts, and which ones were in my range. Once or twice we even sang duets at Mount Calvary, which was a little scandalous, given that most of the folks in that tiny congregation had zero musical ability whatsoever, and tended to look upon anyone demonstrating a talent they did not possess as “showing off,” and quote James 4:16 (”As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil!”).

     That was the first and only creative collaboration I ever had with Mom, but it turned out to be one of the most important collaborations of my life, because it gave me a deep and abiding love for music that is stronger now than ever. But after Dad killed himself and Mom crawled inside a bottle, there were no more duets for us around the old piano. I still sang, but only in my room, and now I was accompanying the likes of The Eagles, The Allman Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Mamas and the Papas. As I got older and moodier, I delved into music where the focus was more on instrumentation than vocals. But the love of harmonies never really left. And when I finally decided in Middle Age to pick up a guitar, I picked up an acoustic. I never wanted to learn how to shred Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption, but I did want to be able to perform some old John Prine songs – in three-part harmony.

     And let me tell you: that’s some good shit.

Chapter Thirty-Two.

     Yeah. I know. It's been over a month since you heard from me. I've been working on some shit. I'll show you in October.

     I also thought long and hard about whether to publish this next chapter. I know it's going to hurt some feelings. Noses will be bent, and feathers ruffled. So be it. This isn't anybody else's story but mine. Understand? My memories, my feelings, my words. A lot of the time they're (I really, really hope) funny. But just as often they're not. This is one of those not-really-sidesplittingly-hilarious episodes, and I feel like a pussy for ever even thinking I might leave it out. This is how shit went down in my life, and yeah, it might have happened a long time ago and I should probably be over it by now and I mostly am, but this is the process by which I am dealing with the aforementioned shit. 

     All that above, by the way, was mostly for me, I think. Not for you. Anyway, here's the next chapter of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life, which is a memoir I wrote that has some decently funny shit in it. And this is NOT one of those chapters...

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Family Shit

  Let me be real fucking clear on this: my mom meant well. She has always meant well. She still does. She’s also a product of her upbringing, as I am a product of my lack of upbringing. In her case, she was the only child of Irish-American, East Texas parents who took pains to remind her early and often that anything which went wrong in her life was her own fault. That included a growth spurt when she was a teenager that left her a full head taller than the other girls at Round Rock High School (Go Dragons!), and so an object of derision. It also included a back injury sustained during a school basketball game that was to affect her the rest of her life. According to my MeeMaw Essie, Mom was primarily to blame for my dad’s philandering. “If you take care of business at home, Brenda, he won’t go lookin’ into anybody else’s business.”

     I am not making this shit up. Can you imagine saying that to your daughter?

     My mother’s response to all of this was to become a people-pleaser, a sweet-as-can-be person who would bend over backward to do anything you needed, and who would accept blame for anything and everything that was in her vicinity. By the time I was old enough to recognize this (though unable to express it in words), I hated her for it. I hated her choice in men, her drinking, her telling me she was sorry that we couldn’t afford new clothes for school, she was sorry that she stumbled in so late last night, she was sorry, sorry, sorry.

     I responded like a typical teenage asshole. I was condescending, rude, and, sometimes, just plain mean to my mother. I didn’t act out by getting into trouble outside the house, though. I wasn’t that kid. I kept telling myself I was better than her, precisely because I didn’t get into trouble. I looked down on her, and my new stepfather, as I watched them go out many nights, leaving my sister and me to fend for ourselves (I was fifteen by the time they married, and my sister was eleven, so we were pretty independent, anyway), and come home shit-faced. It never occurred to me at the time that they were two people, with their own baggage, dragging around their own boulders of shame and guilt and regret, and dealing with the hand they’d been dealt the best way they knew how, a way that shut out all of the badness and sadness, at least temporarily.

     It never occurred to me that Mom was also having to deal with the fallout of my father’s suicide. Not surprisingly, Ma Marie (my father’s mother) blamed Mom alone for Dad’s decision to blow his brains out. She never spoke to Mom again. The last time I saw my maternal grandmother was just a couple of years before she died. She was in the hospital in Little Rock, and my Uncle Terry had told me this might be the end. I made the five-hour drive, trying hard not to think about the fact that, except for Uncle Terry (who had settled in Texas), I hadn’t seen my dad’s side of the family since his funeral – twenty years earlier.

     When I walked into the waiting room, I found myself surrounded by strangers. Who also happened to be family. “I know you,” an elderly man at the far end of the room spoke. “I knowed you soon as you walked in. ‘Cept yer a man now.” I walked to him, and accepted his outstretched hand.

     “Hello, Uncle Leon.”

     Aunt Margie was there. And my cousin Jeanne, and I wondered if I looked as older to them as they did to me. Nobody asked me why I hadn’t come to Arkansas in twenty years. Nobody knew I was working on a television series that, by that time, was being shown all over the world. Nobody asked me if I had kids of my own (I didn’t, then). It was all, Good you come, and You look jest like yer daddy. The waiting room was overly lit, and the television was overly loud, and I suppose that’s what stifled any real conversation. Or maybe they wanted it that way. What was there, really, to say?

     “She knew you was comin’. She been askin’ fore ya.” Uncle Leon.

     The ICU nurse led me through several twists and turns of hallways, bright, anti-septic, tile, squeaky shoes, and the occasional groan. We finally stopped at a large door, with a tiny piece of printed paper slipped into a plastic holder :

“NORA MARIE BRANTLEY.” Ma Marie.

     Ahh, fuck. You know what I just realized? I’m in real danger here of writing the whiny, bitchy, oh-feel-sorry-for-me-because-of-my-shitty-childhood memoir that I specifically said at the beginning of the book I WASN’T GOING TO WRITE. And this part isn’t even IN childhood. This part is taking place when I’m… shit, when I’m in my thirties, for god’s sake. That shit up there I just wrote in the voice of Uncle Leon? I don’t even remember if he actually TALKED that way, or if I’m just making some shit up because that’s what he sounds like in the distant, highly questionable and likely unstable parts of my brain that have to do with memory. Which, for the record: anyone who uses the analogy in their head of a film reel and a record player, or a giant file cabinet, when they think about their memory, is dead fuckin’ wrong. Memory doesn’t work like that. Back to the story…

     My paternal grandmother, my father’s mom, whom I had only ever known as Ma Marie, looked unspeakably old, lying in her hospital bed, completely covered up except for her head. Her skin, though worn and stretched from decades of hardship and worry, was nevertheless deep brown in color. My grandmother was Native American, you see, a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the Choctaw Nation. A tribe that, along with the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole and Chickasaw was forcibly relocated from their ancestral homelands as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and force-marched along what would become known in American History class as “The Trail of Tears.”  Ma Marie grew up poor. And I don’t mean “lower middle-income” poor. One in four Native Americans lives in poverty today, so try to wrap your head around what it was like for my grandmother in the 1930s, in Hugo, Oklahoma, just nine miles north of the Texas border, and smack dab in the middle of where the U.S. government had called The Trail of Tears to a halt 100 years before, looked out across a vast plain of absolutely nothing at all, and said, “Here’s your new home, fuckers. Have at it.”

     She was married by age seventeen because she had absolutely no work skills, because she was a girl, and an Indian girl at that. The only thing she ever even had an opportunity to learn was how to keep house, which she did – from the time she was married at seventeen to an alcoholic mill-worker, until she was finally confined to a hospital bed, and left this sorrowful world for good on December 16, 2002, at the age of 78. I missed most of those years, because she cut herself off from us in 1980, blaming my mom for my father’s suicide. Twenty-two fucking years. I grew up, got married, got a career in television (not a big, celebrity career, mind you, but I’ve been on TV a lot), and Ma Marie didn’t see any of it, because the Choctaw can nurse their hurt better than any Sicilian ever born. What little sunny disposition I have is a motherfucking miracle, given that I am the ethnic progeny of two of the saddest, most tragic cultures in history.

     I wasn’t thinking any of that back in 2000, which was when this particular story took place. I was looking at my grandmother, whose face was at once familiar and strange. She looked up at me, and instantly recognized me. She called me by my nickname, which I will now put down in print, possibly for the first time ever. Bubba. That’s right, dear reader. My nickname among my family was, and in some respects continues to be, the most redneck, stereotyped, backwoods, cheap- beer-swilling, tobacco-chewing, cousin-marrying nickname in the history of the South. Bubba. But since many people in my family, particularly on my father’s side, were vocally lazy, as it were, it was often shortened to “Bub.”

     But Ma Marie always called me Bubba.

     She couldn’t talk above a whisper, and all she could manage was, “Bubba. I’m sorry.”  Then she began to cry, and I began to cry, and twenty years of being cut off from my grandmother was gone. Forgiveness is something I have never been good at, but I highly recommend it. Letting go of shit you’ve walked around with for over a generation is, in many ways, better than sex. It’s liberating, and soul-cleansing. And there’s a lot less to clean up.

     When it became clear that Ma Marie was never going to have the strength to carry on a conversation, I went to a bookstore, bought one of my favorite memoirs, and sat by her bed and read out loud to her for the next couple of days. The book was Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, and some of you who have read that book are already going Dude, what the fuck?  THAT’S the book you read to your ailing, poverty-stricken grandmother? A story about an Irish guy who lived a childhood of poverty and ailing health? Let me explain, okay? Ma Marie loved stories. Any stories. The parts of me that aren’t Irish are Native American, and one thing those cultures have in common (besides famine) is a tradition of oral history. Story-telling. Almost all of what I know about my family comes from stories handed down from older relatives (at least until a few years ago, when my ex-mother-in-law became an Ancestry.com expert, and started digging up statistics and shit about my family that I had no idea about. Well done, Marci!). As a general rule, the Irish and the Indian love a well-spun yarn, and Frank McCourt was a fucking master at the craft. Besides, I wanted my grandmother to hear what I could do with words.

     I read aloud to her in my own voice, and during those parts of the book that were dialogue, I would adopt an Irish accent, which, not to be too immodest, I can pull off pretty well. (If you don’t believe me, buy the audiobook – assuming there is one; I still have to get THIS fucking thing published first.) The most vivid memory I have of those few days is of Ma Marie smiling at me as I read stories to her, sometimes in my voice, sometimes as a character. Eventually I was able to say the things to her I needed to say; that it hurt to be apart from her all those years, that my dad’s suicide wasn’t my mom’s fault, that I forgave her, and I hoped she could forgive me. Because at any time in the intervening years, when I’d grown into manhood (a relative term), I could have picked up the phone, or driven up to Crossett, Arkansas for a surprise reconciliation visit – but I didn’t. Because, as it turns out, I can be as petty and pouty as the next motherfucker (ask my ex-wife). Ma Marie nodded and smiled, we forgave each other, I had a grandma again (and she a grandson), and I promised to come visit her as soon as she got back home and settled.

     But I never did. Two years later I got word in early December that Ma Marie was back in the hospital. But my (then) wife was in her third trimester, we were flat broke, and our house was about to go into foreclosure. I like to tell myself that I couldn’t afford to travel up to Arkansas for the funeral. But the truth is, I just don’t think I could handle it. The last memory I have of Ma Marie was one of her smiling at me, and I would much rather hold on to that, than an image of her, cold and expressionless, in an open casket. If that makes me an asshole, so be it.

Chapter Thirteen.

     What a fucking month. Three of my musical heroes are in the ground. I'm working my ass off and still can't see how I'm going to make it to February. I've had the hoodie on for most of the last ten days. With the hood up. In the house. (If you don't understand that reference, jump to HERE. It'll make a lot more sense.) I started a Go Fund Me account to see if people actually like my writing enough to financially contribute to it, and got nothing. (Not true. My girlfriend made the one and only contribution, which technically does count, but also might not count, since I sleep with her. Which does not make me a gigolo, because she contributed financially to my writing - not my penis.)

     The vindictive little boy in me just wants to shut the whole fucking thing down. Take my unappreciated marbles and go home. Except I can't. As bad as shit gets, as underwhelming as response may be, I made a decision to put my words in this space. Keeping my promises has never been my greatest ability. Truth to tell, I have a pretty poor history of that.  So I desperately need at least one instance in my life where I stick to my guns, and this is that.

     And so here is the next chapter of my memoir, Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. Promise. Fucking. Kept.

     Chapter Thirteen

   Spear Hunting on a Budget

In my head, it was totally going to be like this. 

   

 When you’re poor, you do things as a family that other families don’t do. One Sunday my dad was up earlier than usual, doing something very industrious-sounding on the carport. I walked out there to see him sawing an old broomstick in half. Next he made a notch in one end of each of the halves. He then took a long steel nail, and placed it head-side into the notch, leaving the pointed end of the nail exposed. The finished product looked just like a short spear, which I thought was very cool. Holy shit. Was Dad about to take me hunting WITH SPEARS?  Turns out the answer was yes, but not the kind of hunting I’d envisioned.

     Dad piled us all into the Impala, including my mom and little sister (she couldn’t have been more than six, making me around ten), so I knew right away this wasn’t going to be any kind of father/son spear-hunting expedition. We drove out of our neighborhood at Artesian Lakes (the neighborhood with the lake that wasn’t really a lake), and onto FM 2854, also called Old Montgomery Road, a long stretch of two-lane blacktop that connected Conroe to Montgomery, Texas. We’d been driving down this road for about ten minutes when Dad slowed the car, and pulled off onto the shoulder. He ordered everybody out, and that’s when he announced what our family outing was going to be: a treasure hunt for old bottles and cans by the side of the road.

     Dad explained that there was a place we could take bottles and cans to that would give us money in return for them. And that people were always throwing their empty soda and beer cans out of their car windows, so finding them on a much-used stretch of road like this would be easy. Then he opened the trunk and withdrew one of his newly built spears. He looked around for a moment, located an old Dr. Pepper can, and neatly speared it, placing it in a heavy-duty garbage bag he’d tied on to his belt loop. He gave each of us a garbage bag, then pulled the other spear out of the trunk – and handed it to Mom. When I asked where my spear was (I didn’t ask about my sister’s; she was just a kid), Dad informed me that Larenda and I didn’t need spears, as we were much closer to the ground. When I asked him if he at least brought gloves for us to wear, he began to look cross. So I shut up and started looking for bottles and cans.

     Time moves maddeningly slow for children, particularly when they are engaged in an activity they’d really rather not be doing. I tried to make some shit up in my head; I was a treasure hunter. I was the last man on Earth, looking for anything I could use to survive. I was Iron Eyes Cody, the Native American from those “Keep America Beautiful” ads, who had finally stopped crying, got down off his horse, and started cleaning up the country. But I kept getting pulled out of my imagination by the cars that were flying past us on this farm-to-market road. They seemed awfully close, and they seemed to be going awfully fast. I kept looking for Larenda, hoping my baby sister wasn’t straying too close to the road. Mom and Dad were engrossed in the task, and Dad seemed to get angrier as the day wore on. And wear it did.

     A couple of memories stick out from that day. I remember spotting a Miller Lite beer can. I scooped it up, except I grabbed it upside-down, and realized too late that it was still half-full. Rancid beer came pouring out of the mouth of the can and on to my jeans, and it smelled like the devil’s own piss. (It might also be why I do not drink Lite beer to this day.)

     Later in the afternoon, when all four of us were covered in dirt, grime, and the remnants of many bottles and cans, a car slowed near us, pulled over and stopped. The man behind the wheel I recognized as one of the deacons at Mount Calvary Baptist Church. I didn’t know what a deacon was, but I did know that I didn’t like this man very much, because he always seemed to be smiling in a way that suggested he was better than you.  I was close enough to hear part of their exchange.

     Him: “Hello, John. We missed y’all in service this morning. What’re you and your family doin’ out by the side of the road on a day like today?”

     Dad (chagrined): “Just, uh, you know…collecting some bottles and cans for recycling.”

     Him: “Is that right? Well…bless your heart.” And he was smiling that smile, which nowadays I would classify as a shit-eating grin. They exchanged a couple more words and the man drove off, and I could see Dad seething with a barely controlled rage. I was old enough to understand that he was mortally embarrassed. I was also old enough to know that we would be the likely targets of his anger.

     Just at that moment, from what seemed like very far away, we heard a scream. Dad and I both looked back the way we had come to see my little sister, maybe fifty yards away, jumping around and dancing like she had ants in her pants. Which, in fact, she did. Larenda, in her earnest efforts to please, had been dutifully picking up roadside garbage all day. Like the rest of us, she was filthy, sunburned, and tired. But she had evidently found a treasure: a shiny new Coke can that was partially buried in a mound of dirt. She was too young to identify the mound for what it actually was: a fire ant hill. When she successfully pried the can loose from the ground, the little fuckers attacked en masse. Mom reached her first, and as Dad and I arrived Mom was literally stripping my sister down to her underwear on the side of the road.

     Add to this indignity the fact that we had been walking away from the car all day in our search for “treasure.” Dad had, once or twice, gone back to the Impala and driven it along the shoulder to where we were. But at some point he had stopped bringing the car up to us. While Mom was slapping fire ants off my little sister’s skin, I looked back over my shoulder – and realized I couldn’t even see the car. There was no way Larenda could walk that far, so Dad – utterly raging silent by this time – started the trek back to the Impala. I have no idea how long it took him to retrieve the car and pick us up, but it seemed a very long time. And all that time cars were passing us on the road, and slowing, and staring at two dirty little kids, and their dirty mom. And the littlest kid was wailing like a banshee, and the oldest kid was zealously guarding four giant bags of trash – our treasure from a Sunday Family Outing.

     Next Week, Chapter Fourteen: Cancer, Leprosy, Honesty, Sympathy, and Skipping School.

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