Placesas if they still existed. Some people look at me perhaps recognizing something about my smile, my walk or the way I speak certain words. I go to the place where the theatre stood. In second grade I went to movies where now there are only rough grey walls. My grandfather, the one always seen as suspicious, the artist, painted the original interior in an Egyptian style. Now the blue sky is the ceiling and the wall for the screen opens to cottonwood trees along a creek. I bring my wife and daughter to see this shell of memory that encases the entire town. Here is where my great grandfather had a bank. And up these steps you will find the rooms used by my great uncle when he practiced medicine. My suspicious grandfather presided over poker games in the basement. He probably smoked. We walk the streets and the alleys where tiny tornadoes of dust swirl around our feet like the small words I learned even as I listened to the radio on a quiet Sunday night a world away from the war and my father's desperate courage in the face of overwhelming odds. __Michael Poage |
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