Greetings on the occasion of your birthday in 2013 from the
skinny slick-haired pointy-nosed guy who one day just showed up in your sixth-grade
math class at Beattyville Grade School and is still alive and, GOOD NEWS, so are you!!! I am writing this note to you on the occasion
of your birthday, sealing it until time transport is available years later, at
which point I will send it to you along with the demand that you reveal none of
the things from the future of which I inform you. Even though from the day you
read this letter forward you will have foreknowledge of much of what will
happen, you will be expected to only nod and smile when events you anticipated
unfold, making everyone else think you are just as in the dark as they are.
Occasionally it will cause people to refer to you as aloof or condescending,
but don’t let that bother you. It is not that you are better than they, only
that you have been forewarned; and eventually they will understand what they
took to be smugness actually resulted from your having received this
correspondence detailing events from decades to come.
Big events will begin to unfold soon, such as two more U.S.
national figures being shot down in cold blood, MLK, RFK; only a few years
after the murder of JFK. Shortly before the first of these tragedies, your high
school basketball team will go the state tournament and lose to Glasgow after
winning the first two games! Five years later your high school basketball team
will return to the state tourney only to lose in the first game, a game in
which you will score one point.
You and I will lead the high school baseball team to the
regional tournament in our senior year of high school as first baseman and
pitcher/short stop respectively. We will also sing a duet of “No man is an
Island” at our high school graduation, but later that same year, Richard Nixon
will resign as president and test the theory espoused in that beautiful little
song.
That same spring you and I will star as Emile Debeque and
Joe Cable in the HS musical, South Pacific, making us stars of a HS musical
before it became cult movie years later. We will also sing in a combo that
ultimately wins a 4-h club award and plays at the Kentucky state fair. This
after us each being selected to All-State chorus in our junior year of HS. We
were the second coming of Simon and Garfunkel, without all the hoopla.
As the doctor told your mother, you grew to be tall, really
tall, around 6’ 6” or so. I only reached 5’ 11”, which would make me taller
than the average, only to be forced to play Jeff to your Mutt. This, along with
the fact that you would marry Kim Brown, no shorty in her own right, would
result in your bearing most impressive offspring, such that when the four of
you entered your church on Sunday morning newcomers would look at the four of
you in awe, such tall, regal looking parishoners.
As we are playing baseball one day in Powell County and you
tag the base with the ball in your hand the runner will spike your middle
finger and I will go over and called him a son of a b***h. Yes, me the preacher’s
kid. It turns out I will steadily grow away from religion, but you will not and
your mama would always be proud of you, but my daddy will puzzle over me.
You and I will go to College at Morehead and you will major
in vocal performance, even staying around for a Masters Degree in Music and
it’s a good thing you do stay around because you fall in love with your future wife
while you were both in the play Shenandoah, you playing the main role – Charlie
Anderson. Yep, you will become quite the ladies man around that time, teaching yourself
to play the guitar, having the ladies swooning over your rich baritone voice
and ultimately breaking the hearts of all but one: Kim Brown.
A few years later you will marry her and be blessed with those
two most gorgeous children I mentioned, just like they draw it on the board, a
boy and a girl, both with yellow hair, charming faces and pleasant
personalities. You would turn out to have those children after you had sworn to
me when we roomed together at college that you would not have any because you
did not like the direction the world was going. I guess you will have changed
your mind and decided the world needed two more people to help tip the balance
back in the right direction.
Yes, we will room together at college but shortly after we
graduate our lives will take us to different places and we would never live in
the same town again. However, we will write many letters to one over the years
and in the late 1980s, we would start sending one another electronic mail from
our personal computers. I know, that’s crazy, right, electronic mail? All sorts
of inventions impact us as we get older, too much for me to tell you here. But
another computer-related one that occurred was Facebook, beginning in 2004,
something that allows our friends to view this letter I am writing to you all
at the same time.
You will go to Indiana University to get your doctorate in
vocal performance, training to be an opera singer, only that does not prove to
be your passion, so you will come back to Kentucky and eventually get your
graduate degree in marriage and family therapy at the University of Kentucky. During
this same time, the United States will turn against poor people and start
honoring only the wealthy and this will last until it reaches as sickening apex
around the time I am writing this.
Men will go to the moon a few years from the time you are
reading this, but they will stop doing that after a while and return to
pummeling people from other nations with weapons of mass destruction, owing in part to the fact that shortly
after the new millennium, one of the nation’s largest cities will be hit by a brutal
attack from people of middle-eastern extraction, an event about which I will not be specific; but suffice it to say, it will be
gruesome.
So hunker down, my friend, there are lots of crazy things
coming to the nation you love, but your mama will live a long life and no, she will
never disappoint you and she will go to her reward knowing you became an
upstanding citizen with near renaissance-man capacity for variety from golf, to
music, to parenting, to fly fishing, to husbanding, to counseling the suffering.
And know that I, your BFF (sorry for that future reference, but it
means best friend forever) will as long as we both live, honor you as one of the greatest people he has
ever known. So I hope you appreciate this day, the day you have received this letter from
the skinny little slick-haired pointy-nosed boy who just now entered your 6th
grade math class. But don’t tell anyone our little secrets.
