Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Nineteen fifty-six. A momentous year,
the year we left where I’d lived all my life —
well, the first nine years of it, so all then —
and I moved to a town where everyone
knew everybody…and most were kin.
I have a self-diagnosed genetic ineptitude
for remembering names. We moved
as soon as school was out. Three months
stretched long, but fall loomed fearsome.
But it’s Quanah I call home, not Lubbock
though I lived about as long in each.
How could I have known?
I chose McMurry as a small Methodist school
not too far and with a marching band.
Prof Bynum was tired of marching…
he’d started such in Texas high schools
and my only C’s on the transcript were Band.
I went to Peggy to be hypnotized
but she did mind suggestions,
not the trance I wanted.
But she knew what was wrong with me
and patiently fixed it, molded me,
got me to the rooms of recovery.
We don’t have to have life all planned out
but when we look back we see the tapestry
woven out on the road we traveled,
beauty stretches out in the form of a life.