In a Piss-Ant Place

Six years-old. We live seventeen miles from Johnson City, Texas, birthplace of you-know-who, in an even smaller town called Blanco, a piss-ant place with little more than a bowling alley and cafe, a post office, a small grocer, and an old courthouse falling down in front of everyone's eyes. There is a Dairy Queen and a laundromat at one end and another burger joint at the other.

We will leave in six months, though I don't know that yet, and then three years later we will return, after living in Egypt and visiting Lebanon when I am still six, leaving for a long trip to Asia before I can finish second grade when I am seven, then Hawaii when I am eight, and back to living in Blanco at nine. Got that?

I hate Blanco. On the first go-round my first grade year started there badly as I am intensely bored by my schoolwork at Blanco Elementary. We are expected to study reading from workbooks with no cohesive characters or plotlines. Many times the teacher wants us to read aloud, and the other kids plod along in barely audible monotones. Where is their feeling for drama? For color? After several experiences with a Dick and Jane primer I walk up to the teacher, Mrs. Stowbough, and smile sweetly. "I really don't want to read this shit," I say with no comprehension of how negatively this simple declarative sentence will strike her. She sort of cuffs my ear a bit and tells me she will call my father about the incident. When I get home I tell my father that my teacher hit me. He storms down to that school and tears the poor woman a new asshole. Adam is actually great about things like that, insisting we must never follow authority blindly. It doesn't occur to him that I will turn that logic against him sooner rather than later.