Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones

bars and I finally managed to go off the high dive when a yellow jacket chased me off the diving board. Mostly, though, we went to the movies. With Bobby Parker that summer, I learned for the first time about doing something purely for the fun of doing it. Until then, everything in my life, from church to school to movies, was about learning a lesson. Morals and messages were, as far as I knew, tied to stories like strings to kites, and living with my mother was like living with Aesop. I don’t remember my Presybyterian kin ever doing anything just for fun. Even when we played games at home, Parcheesi and Rook were turned into lessons about how to be a good loser (I wasn’t). Those hours Bobby and I spent in the dark were something else, something more carefree. We never acted out what we watched. We liked some things better than others, and we talked about what we saw, mostly to debate if we wanted to sit there and watch it again. If we decided to stay, and we almost always stayed, we’d dash back to the concession stand, grab more popcorn and then settle in for the next show. That summer, the movies were, for the first time in my life, not just a treat or a diversion but their own reward. Bobby and Ihad no goals, no purpose. We never tried to figure out what lessons we’d learned from what we watched, and there was no arguing about what was proper or unworthy. We did what we did because it was there to do—and because there was air-conditioning. I don’t believe it ever crossed our minds that we were experimenting in the esthetics of pleasure, of savoring something for its own sake. There was a lesson here too, obviously, but I was blessedly spared the awareness that I was learning it.

  Collision at Jones Crossroads  
    This time there was no ride to the cemetery after the church service, because the graveyard was right outside the church door. That disappointed me, because this was the first funeral I had even been allowed to attend, and I had been looking forward to riding in the caravan of cars that snaked slowly to the cemetery, all of them running their headlights in the middle of the day. Back then people still pulled off to the side of the road when a funeral procession drove past, and if you were a member of the dead person’s family, you got to ride in one of the limousines at the head of the convoy. This time everyone just walked a few feet to the grave site, a sharply edged hole in the ground surrounded by folding chairs under a green awning set up by the funeral parlor. I was disappointed that I did not get to ride in a black limousine, but I was still pleased that I got to sit under the awning with the family, because Daddy was one of the dead man’s brothers. I sat between my parents. It was the first time I had seen my father in several months, because he had been living with his brothers there in South Carolina. I was used to this by now, my fathergoing off for several months and then returning home. This was the longest he had been away, and he hugged me through the whole service inside the church and outside under the tent. It was hot and still under the awning, the sun having passed noon only two hours before, but the preacher proceeded with typical Presbyterian efficiency—an efficiency married to the sort of courtesy that made things move along without ever seeming rushed, a talent, I was surprised to discover, possessed even by a country preacher. By a little after three everyone was back at the home place. My father held my hand all the way back to the house, making sure I was in the middle between him and my mother.
    When Uncle Buddy died and they called on Saturday and said the funeral was the next day, I was sad because Uncle Buddy was my favorite of my father’s three brothers. Every time he saw me, he’d slip me a silver dollar, a coin so big that it filled the palm of my hand. The brothers all lived in the country outside Lancaster at Jones Crossroads. Uncle Richard was a big,