Died Too Young
During my salad days, when I was at Hinds Junior College, before Millsaps, working full time, and majoring in nursing students, I got a terrible message.
A boy I knew, someone I played football against, lifted weights against, put shot against, chased women from another part of town against, died from a heart attack in his tiny one-room apartment, where he hoped to forge an escape from his mother's house to his own.
His grandfather had a fairly famous men's store in Canton. During the great flood, his brother and I used two canoes lashed together and topped with a piece of plywood so we could save parts of people's homes from the advancing Pearl River, filled with cottonmouth snakes, alligators, and turtles who could bite your foot off and not let go till lightning struck.
I'm aware that many of my stories sound made up. I swear they're not, at least not this one.
Italian Catholic boys and Scottish Methodist boys have more in common in Mississippi than you could imagine. Two girls from his school taught me to kiss with our mouths open in the back seat of my mother's Ford Grenada. Quite a shock at first, I decided it wasn't entirely bad. I never kissed the girl I wanted to kiss. That's not unusual for me.
Should I go to the funeral?
Catholic churches, Catholic families, and Catholic funerals can draw quite a crowd. The putting to rest of a popular high school athlete, the year after graduation, attracted more people than Moses led out of Egypt. Raven-haired beauties with black eyes from sixteen to sixty spread from here to kingdom come. Blondes and redheads, too, but who cares?
I sat as far in the back as I could. While we shared things only friends shared, including an honest attempt to outsmart a river, you can't really say we were close, so I watched his family cut a limb from their family tree in silence, from a distance. I wept for them. The universe of my friends was becoming smaller.
I've experienced so much death. Nothing is worse than the death of a promising young person, or a person so young you can't tell if they're promising or not. Often God's hand takes young people from the crumpled steel of an automobile, but sometimes from an unexplained heart attack, and sometimes from either a stray or sometimes aimed bullet, either fired by them or someone else.
Oh Death, where is thy sting? I dunno, brother. I seem to have carried most of these stings still stuck in my skin. I hear if you pull them out, the insects' last cruel trick is to inject their worst venom into you, just out of spite.