The South of my childhood was an ideal place for the exuberance and sometimes reckless abandon with which boys grow up. The area was running through forests of pine trees. Our summer days were filled with baseball games, catching snakes, climbing trees, and a multitude of other activities which brought us home sweating and tired and stained with dirt and leaves. These were things I couldn’t do when we visited my Yankee cousins in Stratford, Connecticut. There were no woods outside their house, just a terrible and boring maze of asphalt and sidewalks. I watched my uncle Tom sit on the edge of his chair and root for the New York Yankees and wished I could be back home playing baseball in Ronnie Knight’s yard.

It was a time in my rural area of Georgia when children could disappear all day and mothers didn’t worry about us being abducted if we were gone for more than a couple of hours. I never felt a lack of anything to do, indeed, the modern phenomenon of boredom our electronic age suffers from was hardly known to us. There were always games to play, trees to climb, and the creek which wound its way through the countryside behind the last house on Lavista Court, next to the single track line of the Southern Railroad. On a seriously hot Georgia summer day, a half a dozen kids could be found there, taking turns swinging on a vine hanging over a deep pool of water. We would launch ourselves at the vine from a bank above the pool. Back and forth, one, two, three times, then letting go at the height of the swing, arms flailing, to drop into the cool water below. Once we saw a Cottonmouth Moccasin making its way lazily upstream. We all started hollering at Eddie Meese to get out of the water, but he ignored the snake and the snake ignored him.

Any day in the summer was a good day to be outside. It was a time before electronics made childhood the art of staying cooped up all day with a device in your hands and no interaction with the outside world. By the time I was ten, mom and dad had something called television – a box with black and white pictures – but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as the dead cow we found floating downstream one day. We threw rocks at the innards until they punctured and spewed blood and gore into the stream and the remains of the carcass slipped from the log upon which they were impaled to continue their downstream journey to parts unknown. Word of something like that got around the neighborhood pretty quick –“Hey, there’s a dead cow down in the stream!” – and the next thing you knew, there were a half a dozen of us standing on the bank, pointing and talking excitedly about the carcass until someone threw the first rock. Then the talking stopped and we all joined in.

With all that energy, there were a lot of ways an industrious young lad could make a little extra money. I started mowing yards when I was ten. My favorite yard belonged to Mr. Simmons. He had a big corner lot with a back yard which consisted of a couple of steep hills, and for some reason, he didn’t want to cut it. I was all too happy to make five dollars for a few hours work in the morning. This was a small fortune back when Nehi orange was a dime at Mr. Langford’s general store. After I was done, Mr. Simmons would invite me in and offer me a glass of cold water.

On some days, after I was all finished and cooled down, Mr. Simmons would bring out the Milton Bradley board game, LIFE. He would carefully set up all the pieces – the little toy cars, the figures, the playing cards – all the while talking with me in a friendly way. I don’t remember anything in particular we talked about, but I do remember his daughter, Rita. She made an impression on me from the first time I saw her. She was a couple of years older than I, a beautiful dark-eyed girl with long black hair and dark skin the color of coffee with a dash of cream. I was fascinated by her, and would stare at her as we played, enchanted by her darkness and beauty. In my parent’s world of southern white girls, she was an oddity, not black, but probably Spanish. I never did find out. We would play until there was a winner, then I would thank him and head home.

Once in a while, on the walk home from Mr. Simpson’s house, I would duck into Langford’s General Store to spend some of my riches. The store was a simple rectangle of stacked cinder blocks painted white, with a large plate glass window from which Mr. Langford could look outside as he waited for customers. His little store carried all the necessities for people who didn’t wish to drive miles into Decatur or Tucker, the two nearest towns. Laundry soap, toothpaste, bleach, clothes pins – and many more of the basic necessities people might run out of. In the front, in shiny rows of various colors, were numerous candies. A nickel bought a Baby Ruth candy bar twice the size of one for which you pay a dollar today. After school there was always a crowd of kids going through the snacks. I never saw Mr. Langford lose his patience with the sometimes unruly crowd of youngsters busy getting their after school sugar fix. Over the years, Briarlake Elementary School, right across the street from the store, must have made the man a comfortable living.

The big draw for us kids was the bright red Coca-Cola cooler. It was a stubby, low cooler with rows of shiny metal bars which ran from left to right inside. Coca-Cola logo was splashed across the front; raised white letters in the iconic scroll of the beverage company. The bars were placed close enough together that the neck of a soda pop bottle would slide back and forth between the bars, but the bottle itself, fatter and wider, could not be removed. Bottles hung in the cooler by their necks, not just Coca-Cola, but a variety of sodas, each one identified by the brand name on the cap. Their bottoms were suspended into a slushy soup of ice and water which kept them cool while they waited for someone thirsty. At the end of the row of bars was an open channel which led to a flip lock, controlled by a small box into which you would put a dime. This would release the lock so you could lift the bottle straight up and out of the confines of the cooler. It was an effective anti-theft device, but it was clumsy to work with, and more than once I had to go to Mr. Langford because I lost my grip on the bottle while trying to bring it through the lock. The bottle would slip from my grasp and the lock would snap back into place, waiting for another dime to free the occupants of the cooler.

I never took the time to really know the Mr. Langford family, even though I saw Mr. Langford every day at his store. They lived in a small, simple house about a hundred feet from the store. I had two interactions with the Langfords. The first was with Wayne, the oldest son. We got into a fight on the playground of Briarlake Elementary. I don’t remember what it was about – probably nothing other than the usual foolishness kids take so seriously and feel they have to fight about. The whole incident might have lasted ten seconds. Wayne pushed me, I threw a couple of punches which bounced harmlessly off him, then a teacher standing nearby stepped in between and separated us. Wayne was a big kid and my small fists probably had no effect upon him at all. After the episode, he went about his business and I went about mine and the whole thing faded away.

The second episode was more memorable. A strange, whispered tale had come to my ears, a story of an unseen Langford child, a boy who couldn’t run and play like the rest of us. Because I was dreadfully curious about such things, I made my way over to their house one day to see if I could see this wonder. Mrs. Langford observed me at her door, then nodded her head and quietly led me through the small living room in the front of the house to a bedroom in the back. There was a crib in the bedroom, pressed against the wall, a single wrinkled sheet pressed against the bars. She reached into the crib and gently withdrew a large child. He was bare against the summer heat, a diaper his only covering. He was large, terribly skinny, and his arms and legs stuck out from his body in odd ways. There was a blank look on his face, and a small bit of drool sliding out the side of his mouth. His head lolled to one side at a funny angle.

I remember saying, “He’s a really big baby, Mrs. Langford.”

She regarded me with kindness I didn’t deserve – this boy who had made her child a spectator sport. It was the charity peculiar to folks who are forced into a situation they didn’t ask for. It is God’s grace – developed in the crucible of insensitive whispers by unthinking neighbors, by rumors spoken just loud enough to be overheard. It does not come easy. It is built upon prayers and tears and the final resignation to God’s will in which one accepts not only the cross He has sent, but forgives those who know not what their unthinking words do to a heart already heavy with sorrow. I could not have known that as I stood there. I just saw a strangely large baby, an oddity I didn’t understand as I received the grace of her gentle, smiling response to me.

“He’s not a baby, honey,” she replied softly.“ He’s nine years old.” Her face was tender with love for her child. There was not a hint of anything other than kindness in her answer to me.

I was shocked – and a little embarrassed – and for once I didn’t know what to say. How was he nine years old? Thank God I kept my mouth shut and just watched as she rocked him and spoke softly to him. I was confused, trying to understand this being who looked like a baby but was, I had just been informed, actually nine years old, dressed in a diaper and unable to speak. A boy who should have been swimming in the creek with Eddie Meese and me. He belonged in the store with his dad, filling the Coca-Cola cooler with soft drinks. His mother cooed at him. He gave her an odd, drooling smile in return, his mouth uttering strange noises and his limbs jerking spasmodically.

How is it that people find the grace to overcome not only such tragedy, but also the morbid clumsiness of others? I don’t remember what I said to Mrs. Langford when she answered my knock on her door, but I have an uncomfortable feeling it was something terribly insensitive in my youthful curiosity.

Early in the Fall, word came to me that the Langfords’ crippled son had died and was buried in a small cemetery on LaVista Road, less than a mile from my house. Months later, on a gray but pleasant afternoon, curiosity prompted me to walk the side of the road, past Ronnie Knight’s house, and down to the cemetery. I jumped onto the short stone wall separating the cemetery from the road and searched around until I found a simple tombstone with his name, his date of birth, and death. A simple line at the bottom said “At Home With Jesus.”

It was my first contact with death. I had never known anyone who had died, had never been to a funeral. I stood and stared for a long time, thinking of how strange it was that this child I had seen just months before now lay under the still fresh scar of earth where his parents had laid him to rest. The cool of the late winter day, the gray clouds above, seemed very appropriate to me for such a sad occasion. I noted his name – Robert – and mumbled some sort of child’s prayer for the boy before I walked home, my mind wondering about a boy who should have played with the rest of us kids, but never did, and died so young.

Mr. Langford’s store is gone now. So is the empty field across from my house where I chased grasshoppers in the tall grass next to Ronnie Knight’s yard. In fact, just about everything which was there as part of my childhood is gone, even my house. Someone bought the property, bulldozed the house, and erected in its place a two story mini-mansion made of brick. I know this because I looked up my address on Google Maps a couple of years ago. The big brick house in this picture looks terribly odd and out of place between same plain, flat ranch houses where the Richardson and Meese families lived.

Sixty years ago we were country folk. Our house and all the others on Lavista Court were simple little houses, most of them single story ranch houses for lower middle class families. I remember times when I entered their kitchen to find Mr. Meese cooking sausage gravy and making biscuits. Now the whole area is considered upscale. The great woods where we ran and played are all gone, replaced by fancy, large houses crowded in one on top of the other where the woods used to be. There’s not even room for a decent garden like the Meese family had, where they raised corn, okra, beans, and peas for their dinner table.

Twenty-eight years after my parents moved us to Washington I returned, a brief stopover on a long drive to Florida, a necessary pilgrimage to honor an insistent longing. I found Lavista Court, parked my car, and opened the door to the familiar heat of a Georgia summer day. With eyes closed I stood on my old street and listened. The smell of just mowed grass punctuated sweet, faint echoes I could once again hear, of now grown children running through a lawn sprinkler in Lee Horner’s yard as it went back and forth, shooting arcs of cool water into the flat Georgia heat.