Luck or Something Like It Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t do the shooting myself. My grandfather grabbed his gun, shot the squirrel, and headed back, just that quickly. He was clearly disappointed in me, and I knew it.
    I’ve since wondered, at times like that, if my grandfather ever realized that, music aside, there was a huge chasm between him and his grandchildren—or at least this one. Grandfather Rogers was rural East Texas, and I was Houston. Big difference.
    Even to this day, I’m not much of a hunter and I’ve never felt comfortable around guns. The only gun I ever remember owning was a .22-caliber rifle. When my first wife, Janice, and I were married, I ended up with that gun, though I have no idea where I got it. My brother Billy, who was probably fourteen or fifteen at the time, came to spend the day at our house while I went to work. While he was sitting in our living room holding this gun, it accidentally fired, glancing off the top of the coffee table and lodging itself in our neighbor’s house across the street. Billy was too young to see the danger. He was really worried about having scratched the coffee table. Later in my career, I had to do a number of gun scenes in the Gambler movies, and even though I knew the rounds were blanks, it still bothered me.
    Because my grandparents grew their own food, our meals out there were usually homegrown vegetables and freshly killed game. Sometimes during the day I’d sneak away to my grandpa’s watermelon patch and eat a melon while it was still attached to the vine—delicious as long as I didn’t get caught. Those visits to Apple Springs were really special to me, filled with memories of great food, great music, good fun with all the cousins, and exploring in the woods. That’s an experience you can never forget, especially at night, by yourself.
    Even when I wasn’t in Apple Springs, music came to me from all directions growing up, and on one occasion it actually changed my life. I was walking home from grade school one day, and like most days, I stopped by Lanzo’s Grocery, where Mr. Lanzo would sometimes give our family food that hadn’t sold or had to be thrown out. Lanzo was a good man. There was a little black gospel church just down the street from Lanzo’s. Sometimes I could hear music coming from that church, music that was far different from what I heard every week when my mom and the family took the bus downtown to First Baptist Church. I loved going to our church. It was huge, with maybe a thousand members, and it had youth and sports programs. I sang in the junior choir, and on special occasions we got to stand in front of the main choir of adults, resplendent in their immaculate robes, and sing our songs. It was a beautiful, spiritual sound.
    But the music I heard coming from that little church down from Lanzo’s was something else. The power of those voices was so strong, and my curiosity became too much to resist. One day I crept up to the window of the small wooden building and peered inside, wondering if I was doing something wrong and hoping no one caught me spying. The whole congregation was standing, clapping, singing, and some of them were dancing in praise of the Lord. Some of the hymns had the same words as ours, but there was so much warmth and honesty and rhythm in this sound.
    Although I didn’t realize it at the time, listening that day to that gospel choir was a defining moment for me. I could hear the same songs played in different ways and appreciate both. I could see that everything about the music was in the approach taken. I have always loved all kinds of music and love hearing them played separately or merged together into a kind of fusion. I’m no purist. I just love the music.
    As I said, music was always around. Besides the fiddle playing in the country, our house seemed to always have music playing on the radio. I remember Mom ironing in the kitchen, a glass of iced tea on the end of the ironing board, and Hank Williams on the radio. My mom may well have been