As I stepped into our yard I quietly moved toward my dad’s kennel. Dad’s prize winning bird dogs, Sandy and Jim (my namesake), were delighted to see me.

Jim was a pure bred boxy male setter with caramel colored spots on a short white hair base. His most distinguishing feature was his voice that sounded more like a bloodhound–than a prize winning quail dog.
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In the summer of 1965 I was 12 years old. On this particular morning my family was asleep. It was 6:30 A.M. when I stepped into our back yard.

The doughty St. Augustine grass irritated my virgin feet too long the captive of black Keds. The uninvited crabgrass surreptitiously invading our lawn, unobserved by our 68 year old colored yard “boy” Aubry, vexing my feet reminded me that neither I nor the crab grass belonged here this morning. This lawn belonged to my paternal grandmother, whom I cautiously called Mammaw, for she resented being called anything that remotely betrayed her caducity. My cousins called her Granny, but this cognomen was even more unappreciated.
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In addition to our two motels, there was one drugstore that gave credit and dispensed viscous chocolate sundaes to waiting patrons. The great attraction of the drugstore was the proprietor’s daughter whose bosom was the lodestone for dozens of excessive testerone endowed McGehee male youth. There were two department stores: Wolchanskies and Martins.
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My mother’s father, James Jesse Bayne, I called him Big Daddy, had run away from his 2 room, Louisiana pine barren home when he was 14. For the next 3 years he lived in woods and swamps in the wild Delta bottoms. Living on the outskirts of early 20th century southern towns, he experienced poverty that was sublime in its intensity.
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Mom knew it. She had literally moved into her living room. She did not want to die in the backwaters of a bedroom. She did not want to die on the bed she and my father had made love and dreamed dreams that neither lived. She did not want to die on the periphery of life. She wanted to be in the middle of the action. Her living room controlled all accesses to her house. She was the gatekeeper and planned to man her station until she literally dropped dead. A captain at her helm. With her CB radio scanning for police gossip, with practically every light burning, with her television running day and night, Mom wanted to feel the ebullience of life until the bitter end. She intended to watch Larry King Live until she took her last breath.
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