Childhood has a way of shifting under your feet long before you understand what change really means. In our family, change often arrived in the form of someone leaving — a suitcase packed, a bedroom suddenly quiet, a familiar voice missing from the dinner table. Each departure reshaped the house in its own way, carving out spaces that were never quite filled back in.
My oldest sister, Wanda, was the first to go. She had practically raised me in those early years, softening the rough edges of farm life with patience and affection. When she graduated from high school and left for Western Union School, the house felt dimmer, as if someone had taken a lamp out of a room already short on light. Her first Christmas away was the first Christmas I remember receiving gifts — a Red Ryder Wagon and a BB gun with 500 BBs. For a boy who had grown up with drought and tension, those gifts felt like a promise that life could hold surprises that weren’t painful.
My brother Charles, seven years older than I, left next. He went to live with our aunt and uncle in Freeport, Texas, where he stayed for four years. Their daughter — an only child — had suffered an accident, and when asked who she wanted to take care of her if something happened to her parents, she chose Charles. He stepped into that role without complaint, and for a long time it felt as though he belonged more to their household than to ours. When he finally returned to Lohn for his Junior year, he was older, quieter, carrying responsibilities most boys his age never knew. He had also become a Golden Gloves boxing champion — something that would serve him well.
Anne, five years older than I, became the sibling I actually went to school with — the one who walked beside me when the world felt uncertain. She was steady in a way the rest of our lives weren’t. But even she would eventually leave, pulled by her own future and the promise of something beyond the boundaries of our small Texas towns.
My younger brother, Jim, arrived when I was eleven, and shortly after that, my parents divorced. The move to Brady marked the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. I finished the second half of sixth grade there, trying to make sense of a life that seemed to rearrange itself every few years. My father had gone to Freeport seeking work, but while there, he suffered a heart attack and died. I was thirteen. Grief at that age doesn’t come with explanations; it settles quietly into your bones and becomes part of who you are.
After Charles graduated, he returned to Freeport and worked for my uncle at his Ford dealership. My mother, Anne, and little brother Jim moved to Brady. We stayed there until I completed my freshman year. Then Charles moved my mother, Jim, and me to Lake Jackson. I was starting my sophomore year, old enough to understand that life was pushing me forward whether I felt ready or not. Anne had already left home for business school in Victoria, and where there had once been seven people, now there were only four.
Lake Jackson was different — bigger, busier, full of people who didn’t know anything about droughts or red‑ant fires or the long shadow of a father’s temper. I finished high school in 1964, at the age of 18, carrying with me the weight of everything that had come before: the departures, the small mercies, the quiet moments of protection I didn’t yet know how to name.
Graduating from Brazosport High School felt less like a triumph and more like a narrow escape. I had come from tiny schools — six students in my class in Lohn, maybe forty in Brady — and suddenly found myself in a sophomore class of a thousand. I didn’t know how to study, didn’t know how to navigate crowds, didn’t know how to keep up. I earned only 2.5 credits that year and had to make up the failed credits every summer to graduate with my class. It was a lesson in persistence, though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time.
During that period, I lived with Charles. He took me to school every day, and because we both liked breakfast, I was always late. I would take the note he wrote to the Vice Principal, Mr. James Slade, in the cafeteria. Mr. Slade would look at the note and say, “I can’t read it, go to my office,” where he would give me three licks with a one‑by‑four paddle about two feet long and send me to class. That happened just about every day of my sophomore year.
Years later, when I enrolled Ben in Brazoswood High School, Mr. Slade was the Vice Principal there. I introduced Ben and told Mr. Slade to treat him the same way he treated me back at Brazosport. He just laughed. Ben had heard the story, and it scared him into being a very good student.
Those years of shifting homes and shifting family taught me something I wouldn’t fully understand until much later — that stability isn’t always found in places or people. Sometimes it’s found in the quiet resolve that grows inside you when life keeps changing, and you learn to stand anyway.