The Middle Row

• Right below my father is another cousin and daughter of my older uncle. She is closest to me in age of any of my relatives. She’s five years older than I am. She spent a summer with us after we had moved to Florida. It was about five years after her older sister had spent the summer with us, and my perspective was totally different. Instead of us being a little boy and a young woman, I was a tween and she was about to go off to college. We ran in different circles. My sister spent more time with her than I did.

• Her mother is standing next to her. She’s the first person in the picture I’m not related to by blood. She’s also the first person I ever saw hit a fawty ounce – King Cobra. I never thought anything of it growing up. She would nurse one all night long. It wasn’t until I got to college and had one myself that I gained a new appreciation of why she nursed one all night. I wouldn’t mention this if I thought she was going to read it or if my grandmother was still alive. They say men tend to marry their mothers – just sayin’.

• Next to her in the glasses and blue dashiki (?) – the 70’s were no joke - is another aunt, my mom’s other sister. She’s a bit of a bottom liner. She’s also one of my favorite people. She gave me the shirt I’m wearing in the photo. She lived in Greenville, South Carolina at the time with her husband who’s standing next to her in a blue track suit – damn 70’s again - won’t get his own bullet point. I never really spent any time with him. He died of cancer in 1985. What I remember about him most – and it’s not really about him - is that before he got sick he lifted weights. He was a grown man and I was a fourteen year old boy. I had just started lifting and decided to test myself with what he left on the bench while no one was around. I got the weight off the bar and it started to slowly fall onto my chest. I was stuck. There were clamps on either side, for safety, so I couldn’t tilt the weight until it fell off. I had to roll it down my body and over my knees. It left a big bruise down my entire body. I got to know my aunt much better after she moved to Jacksonville. I won’t say she was an enabler to my late teens gangsta s**t, but she didn’t really deter me either.


I’m doing the bottom row tomorrow. I want to mention that we saw EJG play Andrew Carnes in O klahoma tonight, and it was a blast. You did a fantastic job E.