Three Old Men

Seated Navajo Woman, Bronze by R.C. Gorman, Creative Commons License CC0

Of Aging, Estate Sales, Dog Rescue, Publishing, and Playing Dice

There are three old men in my home I want to introduce and, yes, I am one — -but I’m not at all convinced I am the most interesting. Because I’m about to wedge all three of us in this piece, the clap meter will tell me nothing.

A little about myself before I get into the interesting characters.

The most salient fact of my life is that I made three attempts to end my formal education because I was miserable in the public schools. Even now, I don’t know whether it was being part of an allegedly dying race or whether it was poverty, but I was like any kid in being discomfited by the perpetual outsider tag.

So I made a break for it in the sixth grade, again in the eighth grade, and finally in high school, where I failed so many classes I don’t know what grade I was in but I do know “my class” was in the tenth and my third, successful escape attempt was in the fall, so I am a ninth grade dropout.

I can say “my class” because it’s a small town and you go to school with the same folks all the way through. There was a wrinkle in that for my class, because we got to experience Brown v. Board of Education on the ground. The number of outsiders increased overnight. I was too young to understand how the tiny black middle class we had was destroyed when all the black teachers got fired.

I…