By Alexander Wilgus
It was on that first day of school that my little town threw the clay of me down onto the potter's wheel with a jarring force and I knew from the shock of it that I had been uprooted from my proper place (which I have never located to this day) and set down in another one that I was now to call 'home'. Though I was young when I came home, I was still too late. That sensation of not being where I was supposed to be (and of being where I was not supposed to be), presided like a silent monarch over every year of my life in my little town and continues even now to sculpt me with the callous poundings of isolation, spin me round in the acute abstraction that comes from such displacement and knead me with the happy and painful prods of ghostly memory.
With my parents in tow, I entered the crowded elementary school gymnasium for my first day of class in my new home. The question of whether or not my new peers would accept me weighed heavily—if not consciously—on my little soul and I was a good deal more dour than usual, though I could not have explained why. As we left the hot, August air and entered the dully lit cavern of the gymnasium the scene which opened before me made an assault on each of my five senses, most prominently the olfactory and auditory. It struck me that I had entered the gates of a new kingdom and that smelled of grass, mud and hardwood lacquer and that its subjects were of a louder and far more energetic disposition than I was. My insides shrank into the posture of a threatened puppy and I kept silent and stayed close to my mother’s leg as we navigated the hordes. The masses of my new peers shifted around the raised bleachers with an antlike kinesis. The noise of the crowd was as unfamiliar to my ears as the scene was to my eyes. Words were indefinite. I remember only a hail of syllables, disembodied from their words, with vowels bent into unfamiliar twangs. All were yelling. The adults too, few though they were, added to the cacophony in their ill-coordinated attempts to wrangle the swarming children into lines. It was as if I had discovered a more aggressive strain of human being; one which adapted to the quiet landscape of the surrounding acreage by developing proportionately boisterous manners to fill the empty space with loud voices, thick accents and all the funniness of colloquialism. I clutched the brown paper bag that contained my school supplies tighter, and looked up and saw Sammy walking toward me.
I had met Sammy a few days earlier at the Kwik Check, the EXXON convenience store just off the highway and only retail outlet in town. He and his two brothers were exiting with their Grandfather, Jimmy Hollis. They wore overalls and trucker hats. I rarely saw Jimmy clad in anything else. Later I would learn the joy of asking him how he was doing, because his reply never varied from minute to minute, day to day or year to year.
“Hi Mr. Hollis! How ya’ doin’?”
“Fiiine as Frog’s hair young man!”
My father once told me that he had asked him how he was just half a second before another man asked the same question. Jimmy stated his usual simile to both parties, one right after the other in succession. Apparently, it was not a remark whose rich meaning could be divided between two separate well-wishers and properly understood. Whatever the reason for this compulsion it was enough to keep it consistent for as long as I knew him. I only remember one occasion when my question was met with a different response. I was older at that time and possessed a more abstract mind that took odd pleasure in the little bits of regionalism that I could coax out of the 'townsfolk'. Seeing Mr Hollis (again, in the Kwik Check) I prodded his attention with the usual stimulus.
"Hi Mr. Hollis! How ya' doin'?"
To my surprise, he looked around the room with a jerking motion, like a scared raccoon. Perceiving no threats he then to grabbed my arm, pulled me close, and told me with great conviction, "Well, pretty good for an old dope!" and after giving a big wheezing laugh he stomped off. I was shocked at his new response and wondered what great happening in his life could have turned his state of bullfrog-likeness into a confidential confession of elderliness, but considering he defined his condition as 'pretty good'--though I considered it a step down from 'fine'--I detected no cause for alarm.
As the brothers and their patriarch exited the store, my parents met Jimmy with familiarity. In those early days I was under the impression that my parents had made the acquaintance of everybody in the world and the idea that they had already made friends in our new town did not surprise me. The boys were all smiles as I shook hands with them; Charlie, Justin and then Sammy who was smallest and my own age. Justin and Charlie were of entirely different stature. Charlie was chubby and blonde, Justin tall and dark. Sammy had obviously inherited the most “Injun blood” as his cheekbones were high and broad, allowing for a similarly broad smile. Different though they were, altogether they were just another pack of farmers off to fix, plant, weld or lift whatever it was that the day’s chores required. If I had passed them in the car and seen them through the window, I would have seen nothing more than a small-town landscape with its accompanying locals as rooted to into the scene as the patches of speargrass that jutted up through the white limestone pedways. But I was not driving through that day, as I had done to this and so many other little Texas towns. I was standing on the same ground and shaking Sammy’s hand. They wished us well and my Dad stopped and talked to Jimmy for a while. Then we went inside.
In the bustling gym, Sammy’s hand was again outstretched, his smile as broad as it had been days before. This time he was motioning for my bag. “Can I take that?” He asked. My parents rippled with delight and indicated that I should give it over to him. I then parted from the safety of my mother’s hip. I can only remember the scene now as my parents retell it: I, small and timid, Sammy big and smiling with his arm around my shoulder as we both left the gymnasium and entered the school building and walked down the linoleum tiled hallways whose smell would in time become associated with sincere fondness, past the cafeteria and its odd hot-air balloon murals and entered the classroom where I met the little band of first friends, first foes and first loves who would sail along with me for the next ten years through bright fall schooldays and the hot summer doldrums, through playground games and bored lunchtime loitering, through Friday-night Football joy and the dark bus rides home.
