The first time was the Summer of ’66.

My grandparents drove over from Louisiana to where we lived in South Carolina and we went to Washington, D.C. I was 6 or 7. Me and daddy and my Granddaddy Teddy went to the top of the Washington Monument. We went to the Smithsonian Institute. We saw the White House.

That was good. That was fine. But I’d seen ponies and puppies being born back in Dillon County, so…

But then…

Then we went to a Washington Senators, Kansas City A’s baseball game. Sat 40 yards up from the first base dugout. RFK Stadium. The Senators won, 8-1. My baby sister woke from a two-hour nap, stretched and said, “That was a good game.”

And it was. And it got me to thinking…

Nov. 21, 1970. Final game of the regular season, clear-as-a-bell Saturday afternoon in the original filled-to-the-brim Death Valley in Clemson. S.C. The South Carolina Gamecocks beat the home-standing Tigers, 38-32, and I watched it while standing on the hill that today is stadium seating around the north end zone. It was the first college game I’d ever been to.

I was 11 years and 10 days old.

Guys in my little hometown took me. They could have drank beer all the way up there and back, but for some reason, they took me. They were in their mid-20s, a lifetime older than I was. Lyn Moody. Hayes Barfield. Rudy Huggins. Wayne Baxley. Seems like there was one more. Maybe Cricket Cox. They took care of me: I sat front middle, back when bench seats were a thing.

The particulars of the day are hazy. What I remember most is this: How can there be this many people in the world? This many colors? This kind of unrehearsed roar?

As far removed from RFK and Death Valley as I usually was in reality, those experiences were where I felt, besides home, most at home. And secretly I knew: All I ever wanted to be was a writer.

I read a lot when I was little, and still do. When I was a boy, I listened to tobacco and corn and soybean farmers tell stories. I listened to their wives. I listened to daddy preach three sermons a week. I listened to momma’s too, only they were shorter and more subtle.

And I played ball and watched ball.

The moments were training me. The days didn’t know it and neither did I. Designated Fate? Probably. It’s been hard but fun to write all this time. So of this new venture? Sure. We’re all supposed to be doing what we’re supposed to be doing, so…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]