Einstein and Tennessee Williams

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve just been to my school reunion.  At my school, we don’t have a class reunion because the classes just aren’t big enough.  We get the whole high school together every two years. This time it’s been 4 years this time because of COVID, which took a tremendous toll on us.  

You may remember what Einstein and Tennessee Williams said about time: it is the farthest distance between two places.

This is doubly true for the place that I come from.  Time has been painting on a rough canvas, putting one layer atop the next without regard to propriety. 

The Plains Tribes were there first; then the Civilized Tribes; then the ranchers; and then came the oilfield.  Somewhat later after civilization began to recede came the purveyors of wacky-tobacky and methamphetamine.  

Every layer is still there having a strange harmony all its own.

The school, McLish, was named after the layer of sand that the oil was discovered in.  While there are a few things, here and there, named for the Plains Tribes and the Civilized Tribes, nothing has been named for marijuana or meth.  Maybe eventually something will if things keep going the way they are.

These sorts of occasions are odd, to say the least.  When you grow up in a small town or a small rural area, things are different.  There are fewer boundaries.  Everybody knows everything about everybody else, but maybe they know themselves, ourselves, the least of all.

Because of the lack of boundaries, and the transparency of your lives, everybody knows you like family.  Or--if you left at any point--they know the person you were before you left.  Sometimes it is difficult for them to see you as anyone else; or you to see them as anyone else.

But I’ve been gone for 42 years now, and there has been some change.  We’ve all acquired...history. All of our paths taken have trampled the paths not taken.  We’ve gone in opposite directions. Going back to that place we’ve started is hard. The trail is so confused that not even a Comanche could read it.

I met a girl there who’d been in my class; a woman, I guess, as she’s almost 60.  She brought me a hand-crafted artisanal puzzle.  She told me I’d given it to her in high school. It is carved from wood with balls and chambers and links of chain.

I don’t remember it. 

I’ve tried to ferret out the memory, but it’s gone.  

I do remember one time she came by house with a group of high school kids in the back of a pickup truck. She convinced my dad--the most overprotective father on the face of the Earth--to let me ride with them in the back of that pickup truck to go to the drive-in movies.  We went to see “Animal House.”  No seat belts--hell no seats.  How did we even live?

Nothing but a young girl’s charm would’ve convinced him to let me go.  My heart swells to remember this even now. Because for the course of one evening I got to be normal.  Because of her, my heart beats a little faster whenever Supertramp plays on the radio because that was her favorite group.

All on the strength of that act of kindness more that four decades ago.

But I don’t remember me giving her the puzzle.

But she remembered.

There is a certain reciprocity there.

People have laughed at me here because I title my column “The Okie in Exile” and style myself as such.  This is only Kansas; there is only a thin imaginary line that separates us.

But those people just don’t know.  A lot of rivers have been forded on my way here, a lot of fences crossed.  Some distances are greater than the geography would seem to allow for.

But we’ve traversed them to get here, and every once in a while we need to travel them again so we don’t forget who we are.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )