At sixteen, my mother and sister and I went to visit the Grandparents in Drexel, Missouri (which deserves its own description at some point). The trip there was hours on the road with me in the backseat with a copy of "All The King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren
It has all became intermeshed in my brain, the open summer corn fields of Illinois and Missouri, the heat and dust of August with the Midwest humidity and the business shirts with their sweat spots under the arms of stumping in Louisiana and the tobacco fields and the white crackers and the poor sharecroppers and my Uncle's farm that couldn't support his family so he doubled as an electrician in this little town of about 400 souls fifty miles due south of Kansas City. I finished it on my Grandmothers front porch swing. Don't think I could reread it without feeling the sticky vinyl seat and my head stiffly propped up by the arm rest on the door. Maybe this car ride was why I went to New Orleans?
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