Bullies Are Still Bullies

As the decade ends tomorrow, my current novel-writing project is sort of a Happy Days TV show look into the past, but not to teenagers of the 1950’s, but to my own childhood in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. It’s a purpose-filled novel aimed right at my oldest granddaughter Eva who is turning ten next summer. You can see she is at home on the stage. She also loves books and reading and seems to understand that her Granddaddy Phil writes books. But she’s not a Civil War nut, and even my dragon story is still too old for her. 

I confess that I’m vain about my efforts at novel writing, and I want my five grandkids all to read something their grandpa wrote. For some reason, I want them to know I was kid once upon a time. So, I’m writing Birdbrain, a semi-autobiographical narrative about me when I was in the fourth through seventh grades. I’m writing in the first person in the voice of a thirteen-year-old looking back at his period of ‘awakening.’

So far, it’s not been hard to zero in on matters that mattered to me back then, and most likely still matter to granddaughter Eva and will matter in a few years to the younger ones, both the girls and the boys. Bullies are still bullies. Meanness still surfaces. Friendships rise and fall. Teachers are still godlike. Cheating at school is still a temptation. Siblings remain our best friends and sometimes worst enemies. Boys and girls still become inexplicably attracted to each other. Mama is still the rock, the queen of home, and there’s still no place like home, as Dorothy so famously told my parents in the 1930’s.

I have included at least one issue in Birdbrain which didn’t impact me back then, as far as I knew as a boy living in that time and place. But the issue actually was having a profound stifling effect on the town where I lived and had a huge ‘awakening’ impact on our whole country in the years ahead. I grew up in a segregated world. The only nonwhite person I ever spoke to as a boy was Aunt Cleo’s maid. Seriously. And I couldn’t omit that then-unrealized slice of my sheltered young life.

Thankfully, my grandkids’ world is different. Granddaughter Eva attends an elementary school in a Dallas suburb in which there is no majority racial/ethnic group. African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and mid-Eastern students are her friends and classmates. I love it. But such was not the case in 1958 in Longview, Texas. Trust me on that. So Birdbrain includes a fictional up-close  reckoning with the pervasive racist beliefs and laws that kept white kids ‘protected’ from black people where I grew up.

Since Birdbrain is a family story which includes two grandmothers, and we are only hours from 2020, here is a photo from 1920, a hundred years ago, of my grandmother Mary McBride holding my newborn dad.

‘Mommy’ as we called her, was never the huggy, gushing sort of granny, but she lived near us, and I spent time with her and remember her fondly, including her waxing my smart-aleck ass in games of dominos, not throwing games just to keep me interested. Probably, those domino games were a catalyst for my being sure Birdbrain includes lessons in losing and falling flat.

Jumping ahead fifty years, here’s my family in 1952 or so, the cast of characters in Birdbrain, with Aunt Cleo who also makes an appearance. I’m the little brother in the picture. And since I’m a chubby old man now, I’m stunned by how slender, some would say how skinny, my dad was back then. Mercy.

For the sake of rounding out a century of our little branch on the McBride family tree, here is a favored photo of 2019. It’s grandson Rory with his great-grandpa Frank, who was the baby in the 1920 photo. Pop will cross the 100 mark this August, and I believe he really will make it.

And because it’s my last blog post of the decade, #156 as if anyone but me cares, here’s a closing picture of me and Teddy, my youngest grandchild, at the beach last summer. Gotta love the grands.

Happy New Year! May the decade of the 2020’s be a wonderful one for you and yours. Nita and I will just have to get over that we’ll both be eighty when the new decade ends, but then again, we understand that old is better than dead, and dead isn’t really dead for followers of the Way. We’re good.