FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: This life story begins in 1973 (kind of) part 60

“Popman,” Cheyenne said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while. I’ve been thinking on it, and I’m not sure I have the exact answer.”

“All right.”

“When you boil it down, who, is this story about? I could make a case for four or five different people.”

I had to let the wheels spin a good many times down the highway myself while I thought on that question, but I figured the best way to answer it was to get started and talk it through.

“I see what you mean,” I said, “It obviously is about the Pup – I mean, he’s the narrator, it’s his story. But then, again, it’s about Doocy. Without Doocy, I’m not sure the story would come together. He’s kind of the glue, in a way, in a strange way, I guess. Then you have the two leadin’ ladies, Mama and Corrina. In the beginnin’, and in the endin’, too, it is about Mama. She takes center stage. But then Corrina comes into the picture, and the story becomes a Shakespearean romance,” I said, smiling at Cheyenne.

“And, jus’ like Doocy, she becomes the glue that ties it all together. I don’t know if I can rank them, either, because, in a way, it is more about the other three, and Pup jus’ tells how those three impacted his life at the tender age of sixteen. So, I don’t even know if we can put Pup in front of the others.”

I paused to let it sink into my own head, then Cheyenne seemed to have an epiphany.

“You think about it, Popman, I think this is probably the way it is with great novels, great stories. The storyteller is not always the major character. He is jus’ the camera that goes around picturin’ the events around him. In The Lord of the Rings, I guess Frodo and Sam are the key characters, but Gandolf, Arwen, Elrond, Theoden, Aragorn – they steal the show, too, don’t they?”

I smiled. “And don’t forget Galadriel.”

“Oh no, can’t forget her,” he said, “and Gollum.” We both laughed because we knew one was as charming as Corrina, the other as mean as Doocy. Putting the webbed-hand, missing-toothed Doocy side by side with Corrina is incongruency at its best.

Cheyenne knew “The Lord of the Rings” just as I knew the summer of ’73. At about the time we began sharing our story with Cheyenne, we were reading Tolkien’s adventure stories together. The similarities go well beyond Corrina and Doocy, too – the journey, the challenges, and the colorful characters that form the plot. The only advantage of the story of ’73 is that the characters are as real as the azure sky and almost as unique.

Before I could answer the question about how the characters make the story go around, Cheyenne had an observation that would propel the plot.

“It’s funny as I listen to it all, Popman,” he said, “but even when we go talk about Doocy and the brick job and all the hoopla that went on there, and then we go to what I would call the tender tale of Corrina, that young love story, I know that the story is not going to be able to come to a resolution until you get back to my great-grandma Louise. Her story has to come to that resolution before we can resolve all the other elements.”

I admired Cheyenne’s depth and listened without interruption.

“It seems like,” he said after a moment, “as you tell the story, you kind of hesitate to go back to that bedroom where Grandma Louise is. You seem to want to stay with Doocy or Corrina. Maybe it seems safer to you there on the other side of the Georgia line, as you say.”

I had never thought of it that way, and it took me a while even to get it in my mind clearly.

It did seem as if everything across the Georgia line served as a distraction, even if it was Red’s hollering, the sun’s beating down on you like hail, your hands calloused and bleeding from handling brick and mortar and heavy sixteen-foot boards, your back all but breaking with the non-stop profound lifting and pushing of the wheelbarrows and flatbeds.

Perhaps distraction is good, even if it comes in those forms.

Then there was the good distraction, too. And the fact that those two distractions were as different from one another as the beauty and the beast. But even there the two come together and form a union.

Maybe that is just the way life is meant to be. At the very least, that is the way the summer of ’73 was. It’s hard even to imagine what the sixteen-year-old mind was going through during all of that.

After a time, Cheyenne got to the point: “Popman,” he said, “I know you don’t like to do it necessarily, but take me back to Grandma Louise, and tell me about my granddad Zion, and what all happened with them.”

When he said that, I could almost feel myself tense up, and it made me realize that Cheyenne was onto something. After the final sunset of 1973, discussing this story took me sixteen years. Now, even in the telling of it fifty years later, it becomes like a shooting star that you see streaking across the night sky and then it’s gone. You let it go, you don’t try to reach out and grab it, you don’t ask for its return, you merely go on and remember that it came by like a flash and was gone.

A shooting star doesn’t change you, though.

The events of July and August of that summer changed us through and through.

Coach Steven Bowen, a long-time Red Oak teacher and coach, now enjoys his time as a writer and preacher of the gospel. And, after a ten-year hiatus, he’s also returned to work with students at Ferris High School as well.

In addition to his evangelistic travels, he works and writes for the Church of Christ of Red Oak at Uhl Road and Ovilla. Their worship times are 10 a.m. Sundays and 7:30 pm. Wednesdays. Email coachbowen1984@gmail.com or call or text (972) 824-5197.