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Show birthday his father gave him only one gift~the chance to do the work of a man and be treated as one~his stories are meant to describe the tough but honorable choices he made as a boy. I am torn between believing my father who says his childhood was a gift, a boy's every desire, and my own guess that it was a time of terror. I know his father beat him, slashed his backside with a belt, that he was scared of his father and would go to great lengths to avoid a confrontation. There he is looking under the wash tubs in the barn for syringes he knows lie buried and broken. I know his father was a monster, but that is not a story a son tells. It will be decades before those stories come to light. Instead he describes how he and his brothers used to hurl rocks over the barn to see which siblings they might hit on the other side, how they drove lead into their skin to make tattoos, used pitch forks to impale mice. He tells stories about shooting carp on the Platte River, what the butt of the rifle felt like against his shoulder, the swift pace of a water moccasin when you are far from the shore. I know about the toy boats he played with as a child, all named "Arizona 88" after the destroyer that was sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the day electricity came to Cozad, how long it took before his family had a television, and the importance of cars in his life, 57 Chevy's and farm trucks, vehicles that could take him away. These seem like stories a boy might tell or maybe stories a man might tell to remember the boy he once was or the boy he wished to be or the boy he wants to recall. They are about mischief and adventure, cars and weapons, expected dangers you can avoid. They are stories a boy should tell but not ones a daughter can trust in tracing a 19 |