Kentucky

Bob, I hope you're out there somewhere and doing ok. In 1972, I had quit school and was working in a restaurant and got to be friends with Bob and a couple that were married and living in IU's married students trailers (a funky trailer park of little green trailers and not so much as a fence between them). Anyhow, Bob was the son of a woman that was only 15 years older than he was, a redhead that had come out of the hills to the south of us in Kentucky and I think Bob's father was Cherokee or something like that, but I never met his real father. Bob's mother had remarried (or married for the first time) a truck driver who had played farm league pro baseball for a while. Bob had a summer thing going on with the School of Folklore at IU and he was supposed to go and collect yarns and mysteries from the little backward county in Kentucky where his mother's family all lived. So I went with him. This county was a dry county- meaning you couldn't buy alcohol there, if you wanted to drink you'd have to drive 50 miles to buy it legally or you could buy it from the runners that brought it in. Bob had a cousin, who was married (at 15) and made his living selling booze to the locals. He had been ticketed a couple of times, not for selling liquor, but for driving without a license since he wasn't old enough to have one yet. Interesting guy. We wandered around, collected stories, the usual for that part of the country: haunted houses and haunted hollows and lakes with snakes in them and tall tales about teenage mayhem. We met a eighty year old black baptist preacher and that had built seven churches throughout Kentucky and Tennessee because Jesus had come to him one night and they had a long talk and Jesus told him to build churches so he did. I don't know if Bob counted that one or even wrote it down, but we were polite to our elders and we listened and made no comment. Bob had a cousin that was fourteen and very pretty. We talked. I was twenty and divorced and getting ready to go off to see the world. She proposed to me in the way a fourteen year old would. She looked hurt when I left (I didn't touch her). We wrote a couple of letters and then I then I had a fling with another divorced twenty year old and forgot all about her. I hope she had a wonderful life