Always searching. I hope I haven’t made her too insecure ever to be content with herself. Her mother’s death from breast cancer when she was in junior high didn’t help. How much did my father’s schizophrenia and subsequent suicide when I was thirteen affect me? It is something I will always wonder about. Sarah has coped much better than I did.

I stop at a convenience store in Moro to use the bathroom. Middle age.

If this is a precursor to what’s ahead, I can’t get too excited about it. Is it my imagination or do I really have to piss fifteen times a day? How do guys who work in factories cope with one fifteen-minute break in the morning? As I read the copy on the white condom boxes above the urinal, I realize I would need a catheter and a bottle the size of a water cooler strapped to my leg to hold a job in a plant.

On the road again with a cup of coffee, I can tell I am back home in the Delta by the increasing number of beat-up old cars with blacks behind the wheel, many of them as ancient looking as their cars.

Despite having been away, I can’t escape the feeling that I know this area, and I know its people, better than I’ll ever know anyplace else.

There is something vaguely comforting about the past even if it was difficult. I think of the way I acted at thirteen after my father hanged himself on the state hospital grounds in Benton.

As far as shitty adolescent behavior goes, I can’t quite say I wrote the book. Walking out of class, talking back to teachers, sneaking beer out of neighbors’ refrigerators, was small potatoes compared to the problems kids have today, but it was enough to make my mother think that she wasn’t going to be able to handle me. She couldn’t afford to send me to Subiaco, but, as Marty, my sister, has pointed out, at the time she couldn’t afford not to. Fortunately, for me, society didn’t have psychiatric institutions for kids who mainly needed a good kick in the butt every day.