Beattyville, part 2...

Beattyville, part 2

The hills, across the tracks and above Beattyville were covered with honeysuckle. To this day the smell of honeysuckle (or jasmine) can take me back.  The hills are still there, and the river. I have it on pretty good authority that they will still be there long after all of us have turned to dust or whatever it is that we become when the worms get at us…

I see photos of Beattyville today and it’s similar to the one I grew up in but also different…when I was a boy, seemed like the alleys were full of vhildren…I don’t think that any of us ever thought of ourselves as ‘children’…kids, yeah, definitely not adults.  Adults were the ones that kept telling us to slow down, don’t talk so loud, must’nt fight…seems as though we needed adults to tell us to go home at night…well, y’know how it is when you get to counting stars…

I remember Betty Euton  (double-jointed, they said )…she ’n Margie (?)  Kieth and Marilyn Harvey practicing cheers in the Euton’s front yard…loved those uniforms…not surprisingly, friends of mine, Yvonne Fultz, Betty Jo Cooper, Barbara Craycraft, all aspired to be cheerleads also…and they could all of them do back-flips and cartwheels…and they made it look easy which was all the more frustating ‘cause I couldn’t do anything like that…’n right offhand, I don’t recall any boy that could…

When I was 10 or 11 years old, Yvonne had a birthday party ’n we played what was then called ‘kissing games’…spin the bottle and postoffice ’n some others, I think…one of those girls was the first girl I ever kissed ’n I don’t know that I ever got over it…

My mem’ries seem to come to me as snapshots, unrelated pictures that play in my mind.  And they don’t come in order…I remember joining the Cub Scouts and the the Boy Scouts…Delbert Fultz was the scoutmaster and had all of us in his house for a meeting, I can’t recall if it was weekly or monthly but he and his wife, Iva, are in my memory just as the honeysuckle and the river…

I have no idea where I’m going with all this mem’ry stuff…if you like it, let me know, if you get tired of all this BS, let me know that also…that might give me enough incentive to stop…

until whatever…..David Smith