The Waterboy bits and pieces of Yesterday Paperback - 2013

By the time I were five year old I was the only water boy in our house. In fact, I ain't sure but what I didn't start totin' water before I could walk. Perhaps just a draggin' that bucket along behind me as I crawled along. Now I know all of this don't seem important to most folks, and that is sure not something that I am braggin' on. It was a damnation to my soul, and a curse on my independence. It put a hump in my shoulders, a crook in my spine and taxed my brain something terrible. But it helped to make me what I am today, and I reckon it could just as easily have made me what I ain't. The Waterboy bits and pieces of Yesterday is the sharing of the author's life as told to his daughter in thoughts and memories "tucked quietly away in fleeting bits and pieces of my mind. Ever so gently they are drifting away into the stillness of the night, farther away from where they can be reached. The time has come, so now I will put it down on this here paper for you to read in the quiet times. Everybody should know from whence they come." It is the story of growing up in the southeast Oklahoma hill country in the 1940's where life was hard and those living it here were poor, but there was always a pan of Mama's biscuits warming on the back of the wood stove and plenty of love to go around. "Mama's love was indestructible and unimpeachable. It could in no ways be duplicated and would forever be extolled and could never ever be criticized. Now I know them are big words, and I had to look every one of them up in the dictionary, but my Mama is worth me gettin' it right. My Mama was the rock, the solid foundation on which we young'ns found solid footin'." "I won't be tellin' you my life only, for it, in itself, is not worthy of the tellin'. However, the times in which the beginnin' of my life took place, now that was a special time. You see, I begin my life in an age of innocence, an age of simple things and uncontaminated pleasure. A time that ain't no more, but should be, and those times should be remembered for the beauty that was created in the lives of those who lived them."