Thinking About Arkansas

"That's the one thing I want from your mother's apartment," my wife reminded me. She was speaking of my nursery school finger paint composition that adorned the kitchen wall of my home back on Huntington Street in Monroe, and later in my late mother's apartment.

Not only was the artwork exquisite, it had it's own libretto of a back story provided by the artist. My grandmother and mother never tired of the tale. I came home from St. Christopher's and proclaimed that this was a picture of a cowboy on a horse who was chasing a Razorback, and in the corner was the invisible squirrel.

Myself, I was always impressed with the turning of two small dots into the eyes of said transparent creature. THAT's making the most our of a situation.

But my mom and her mother were proud of the Razorback. Frankly, it was the best part of the finger work, complete with a spiky ridge-back. Ma-Ma was pure Delta, getting her teaching degree at Arkansas A&M and spending her days as a single parent teaching the children of Arkansas City. She even lived across the street from the one-building school district, where I almost died in a playground . (You read that right; story for another day)

My mother grew up there, playing a little basketball for the old River Rats of ACHS, and eventually meeting up with a Central casting Louisiana rogue that was my dad -- talk about a house divided back when that meant a heck of a lot more between Arkansas and LSU.

Those weekend trips up 165 North into Chicot County, watching the telephone poles along the railroad track fly by from the luggage slot behind the back seat of my mother's black VW Bug. (Hmmm, maybe that's where the trendy small Euro car thing comes from . . .). These two women took great pride in teaching their young Shoat to Call the Hogs at an early age.

Been a lot of change in Fayetteville, but starting a third decade (oh my, a 21st year -- the freshmen weren't even born when I arrived) with the Razorbacks, sometimes you figure you might have been born for something. You just hope everyone else realizes it.