“A Dozen Years in Boulder” by Blake Stone
It’s 2003; I’m nineteen and at my great-grandfather’s hundredth birthday party in the “Brown House,” a farm he started with his father in the twenties. “You’re awfully social today” my grandmother tells me smiling and obviously pleased with my new friendly behavior. I had just come from snorting a bump of crystal meth off the top of the antique toilet in the dirty little bathroom that still has two faucets on the sink, one for cold water, the other for hot. I had lived in this house between the ages of three and five, and the two-story creaky hand-built structure still appears in my dreams thirty years later. I don’t remember much about that day, only that I talked to everyone, which was very unusual for me. Being a third generation only- child meant that all my relatives were at least thirty years older than me, if not several decades. My family was very small and very old; most of them are now dead. I have a cousin on my father’s side, but our families didn’t do holidays together. I do remember that at some point during the birthday gathering, Pa, my great-grandfather, stood up and recited from memory one-hundred verses of “Leaves of Grass” by Whitman. We were all very impressed but not surprised. My great-grandparents were some of the first people to go all the way through school and become college educated in that region of southern Tennessee.
Like most of my recent ancestors for the past two-hundred years or so, I was born and raised in the rolling alfalfa fields of Tennessee.
It’s 2003; I’m nineteen and at my great-grandfather’s hundredth birthday party in the “Brown House,” a farm he started with his father in the twenties. “You’re awfully social today” my grandmother tells me smiling and obviously pleased with my new friendly behavior. I had just come from snorting a bump of crystal meth off the top of the antique toilet in the dirty little bathroom that still has two faucets on the sink, one for cold water, the other for hot. I had lived in this house between the ages of three and five, and the two-story creaky hand-built structure still appears in my dreams thirty years later. I don’t remember much about that day, only that I talked to everyone, which was very unusual for me. Being a third generation only- child meant that all my relatives were at least thirty years older than me, if not several decades. My family was very small and very old; most of them are now dead. I have a cousin on my father’s side, but our families didn’t do holidays together. I do remember that at some point during the birthday gathering, Pa, my great-grandfather, stood up and recited from memory one-hundred verses of “Leaves of Grass” by Whitman. We were all very impressed but not surprised. My great-grandparents were some of the first people to go all the way through school and become college educated in that region of southern Tennessee.
Like most of my recent ancestors for the past two-hundred years or so, I was born and raised in the rolling alfalfa fields of Tennessee.