David Cameron Writes

                  “I’m tired,” Lester said as he pulled his old heap to the grassy verge of the flat, two-lane country road. “You drive.” He slipped the manual gearshift on the steering column into neutral, left the car running, opened his door, and slowly unfolded to stand outside the car. He walked around to the passenger side, jerked open my door, and stood there as I looked up at him like a ‘possum caught in the headlights. I was 12 and had never driven anything but my Dad’s old tractor and a homemade go-cart. You’d think I’d be thrilled that my grandfather had just offered me the holy grail of adolescence. I was terrified.   Granddaddy was my mother’s father. He’d been in the battle of Meuse-Argonne in World War I, the largest and deadliest military offensive in U.S. history lasting from mid-September to Armistice Day on November 11, 1918. By the time I was 12, however, Granddaddy lived about seven ...

  Ronnie Biggers played an iconic role in my life. He was the first black child I knew in school. It was the fall of 1965, and we were entering the fourth grade, the first year Central Elementary in Gastonia, NC integrated. I wrote a poem recently about the opportunity to know Ronnie, who was, as I recall, the only black child in our class. My memory is fuzzy, but I clearly remember the day he and I put our arms side by side and reflected on the superficial identifiers “black” and “white.”   Yesterday I attended a lunch at The Free Clinics in Hendersonville celebrating Juneteenth. The Free Clinics is an organization that marshals the services of paid and volunteer health care providers to serve uninsured residents with physical and mental health care. I’ve been elected to their board, and I was there at lunch with my family and other board members and paid staff.   The director started off with a history of Juneteenth and the continuing racial inj...

  Thoughts of my father are like a waking dream. I hear the whine of his lathe running in the garage at home where he and Mom lived nearly fifty years, and I see my father’s back in the dim glow of a bare, sixty-watt bulb. He’s wearing his old, faded work shirt and striped engineer’s hat, and he’s bent over the lathe making wood chips fly. He was often at his lathe creating small wooden gifts to give to newlyweds or young parents or anyone who might appreciate a set of three finely turned, highly polished walnut or maple or cherry biscuit cutters in graduated sizes.   One of my earliest memories of my father is from when I was four, maybe five. I’m sitting on his lap, peeling dried wood glue from his fingers. I didn’t know it then, but I realized later that he put extra glue on his hands and allowed it to dry before coming in from his workshop. It gave him an excuse to invite me onto his lap and “help” him get the glue off his fingers.   Dad was ...

  “Where’s Cameron? Anybody seen Cameron?” The Ashbrook High J.V. basketball team was stowing gear under the bus, ready to travel to a rare Saturday afternoon game. Coach was getting a headcount. A second check and still no Cameron. I wasn’t worried. I knew where I was. It’s been my habit to disappear at times, if not physically, at least mentally. My mother used to praise my capacity to entertain myself. She could give me the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels, scissors, colored construction paper, crayons, and glue, and I would sit quietly on the floor in the den or at the dining room table and disappear into myself. I’m sure it was a great relief to Mom to get some quiet time. I remember sitting in class in the sixth grade after we returned from the library with books we had been allowed to check out. Like my mother, I’m guessing my favorite teacher Ms. Page wanted a little “me time,” so she told us to get out a library book and read. The next thing I knew, Ms. Page call...

    They say an intense fire creates its own weather. Tom was testing that theory by holding a flat paper towel above the campfire flame and watching it lift in the updraft created by the mini-conflagration. The paper’s rising mesmerized him, and he was bored.   That morning, my Boy Scout troop had hiked to a man made pond and cooked lunch so we could knock out a few requirements for Hiking and Cooking merit badges in half a day. We built our cooking fire on a sandy rise by the pond bordered by a stand of scruffy loblolly pines. It was an ugly spot. The September Saturday was one of those hot, late summer days where the sun is too bright and the noon heat pricks the back of your neck. I was ready to go home and ride my bike, so I was trying to tidy up. Tom loved fire, so he was burning the leftover sticks we had gathered for fuel.   The paper towel Tom waved over the flame suddenly ignited. It burned his fingers, and he let go. The glowing pa...

  I think a psychopath lives inside me. When Kathryn and I watch a murder mystery, I choose the most annoying character and say, “I hope he/she gets killed.” Usually, it’s because the character is a loud talker or a bossy-pants. Even darker still, I sometimes ruminate over the fantasy that a political figure I detest will be assassinated. I wouldn’t do it myself, of course, but I can imagine the setup, the fallout, and the momentary relief I would feel. Momentary, because only a fool or a true psychopath would fail to realize that such a breach could start a terrible chain reaction of violence.   From the moment I developed fine motor skills, I have had the impulse to shoot somebody. What fun it was to learn how to pick the weed with the tough, thin stalk and the firm, green torpedo at the end, loop the stalk around the torpedo, and pull. The torpedo pops off and flies about five feet—far enough to hit the person you’re aiming at.   Sticks we...

  God help me, I wanted Pop Tarts for breakfast. My mother would scramble eggs, fry up bacon or country ham, and bake biscuits fluffy as St. Peter’s pillow, and GOD HELP ME, I would pout and grumble and bring a dark cloud to the table until finally she gave in. She brought Pop Tarts home but could not resist exclaiming each time I tore open a package, “There is more nutrition in the cardboard box!”   In the narcissistic haze of my childhood, I thought Mom’s world revolved around feeding me. Having received a master’s degree in nutrition from Columbia University in New York, she put an enormous amount of effort into making sure we had the freshest, best food on our table. Foodies today would scoff at her southern cooking techniques, like adding sugar to a squash casserole. Bless their hearts; they can't help their ignorance. My early Pop Tart insanity aside, what I wouldn’t give now for a serving of that casserole, one of her biscuits with homemade strawbe...