My cousin – the younger one by nine months – sent me an email about an article a member of her family found in the Wall Street Journal. It was written by a young woman who grew up in the town where my father was born and where he is buried. It is the town where he told of the “oldtimers” telling stories of their Indian-fighting days in the Old West to young boys – my dad being one of them.

It had a bandstand; people gathered on Saturday night; when my father was overseas in WWII, neighbors witnessed my grandmother’s regular walk up to the bank to deposit the allotment he had designated the government send her. She never spent a cent and my dad bought his first car with the money.

I slept when I visited in a bed with a portrait of my great-grandfather in his Union Blue watching over me. My father’s family has been in southern and central Indiana for a long, long time.

I have a postcard from 1950 of Kingman’s main street. I guess I’ll find it and scan it and post it.

And I always wanted to live somewhere exciting and sophisticated; but here I am – Cracker Barrel White Trash in the eyes of the city I always wanted to live in. And it’s okay.