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near to impossible in a town as small as ours. One time, I literally begged Grandma to drive me all the way to Lambert to do my shopping there, but she thought that would be a waste of both time and gasoline when we had a perfectly good thrift store right here in town. I never had the heart to tell her exactly why I wanted to make the trip. But as a result of wearing those pieces of cast-off clothing, often recognized by my classmates, I made giant strides in the continuation of my tough act during those wonderful preadolescent years when girls can be so snide and cruel.
    I don’t mean to make it sound as if Brookdale was such an awful town to grow up in, all full of miserable people and sadness and the like, because that really wasn’t the case. Sure, it’s true that my daddy seemed to attract trouble the way a cookout attracts yellow jackets, but there were many fine and upstanding folks in our town—or at least I thought so when I was too young to know any better. There was something good about being a kid in the sixties—something simple and laid-back, something you just don’t see nowadays.
    The truth is, I don’t think our sleepy little southern town was all that much different from the rest of the little towns spattered across the country, especially at that time. We had a number of small business and retail outfits on Main Street, several eateries that pretty much tasted all the same (no one in our town had even heard of fine cuisine or “ethnic” style foods back then). We had four grade schools, two junior highs, and one high school that could draw half the town to a football game on a Friday night. We had the right side of the tracks and then, of course, the other side (where I usually lived). And I think for the most part, people in Brookdale were having a pretty good time (or so it seemed to me since I was always on the outside looking in). Curiously enough, we didn’t have much trouble with the civil rights movement since the “town fathers” had always seen to it that very few blacks were able to comfortably locate into our town. (Fortunately that all changed during the seventies—after some sharp ACLU lawyers made some interesting discoveries—and today I’m proud to say that Brookdale boasts a much more mixed and integrated population.) But back when I was a kid, the ‘Fine citizens” of our “fair” town thought they had the world by the tail, and for the most part, I think they considered themselves pretty well off, or maybe it was simply a form of blissful ignorance.
    The sixties were like that for a lot of folks, living in their modern ranch houses, eating their TV dinners, and driving their gas-hog cars. There seemed to be a general oblivion to the suffering that happened to other people. And in some ways that oblivion might’ve sustained me too, as if I were playing right along with them, pretending that my life was no different from theirs. But in the same way I knew I was wearing dirty underwear beneath a neatly pressed dress, I knew that my life was not like theirs.
    Even as a kid I knew a hardened exterior was my best protection against the hateful remarks that people like Sally Roberts and her kind so easily tossed my way. And during these difficult times, it brought me great comfort to know I could always count on Joey Divers to listen to my woeful tales and show some honest sympathy. Plus he always had something witty and clever to say about those ignorant people who mistreated others, which made us both feel better. And together we would vow that one day we would make them all sorry that they’d ever treated us in such a fashion, for we still believed that the day would come when we’d both be rich and famous.
    I’d gotten so attached to my little radio that I took it with me almost everywhere. And I knew (or sort of knew) all the words to the top twenty pop songs. And I thought I had a fairly good voice too, and naturally Joey agreed with me, and even put up with me