A few football-ignorant locals were antsy during that final district game since the victory had been by a too-close-for-comfort 21 points and Hemingway had actually scored a touchdown, something only Hartsville had managed to do during district play, and that had been back in early October. But most everyone recognized that Coach Petey Pate was saving a little juice for the next week’s playoffs.

J.Q. Jr. and Cricket played only a quarter and a half in the Hemingway game; they spent most of the second half on the bench playing Scissors-Paper-Stone.

The ease of it all seemed to confuse the barn-sized Cricket, my boyhood hero. It was almost as if he were bored with it. He wasn’t himself at church. Even there he seemed a little sleepy and locked in some kind of perpetual daydream. He didn’t grab me and throw me in the air like he always did after preaching. He even missed a couple of Sundays. It was probably because his brother was in Vietnam and not in vocational school in Lumberton, someone said, a reason that made little sense to me at the time.

A leaf in the wind otherwise, Cricket was still himself on the football field. The Aucs thumped Sumter, 28-10, then beat Cheraw, 30-7, to win Lower State. The state championship game against the Graniteville Rocks was an almost anti-climactic 35-0 butt-busting.

It was a beautiful thing for a kid like me to watch his high school heroes paste everybody, to be in the middle of the whole town in the stands on a Friday night, to trade high-fives with J.Q. Jr. and Cricket and all the other happy Auctioneers outside the fieldhouse.

But it was confusing that Cricket had started to understand the world outside his hometown and mine. Or not so much to understand it — no one could ever fully understand it — but he’d started to be disturbed by it.

You get a certain age and the world expands past Friday nights. It hadn’t yet for me, not back then. Not for a guy who lived and died with his Friday night heroes, not when losing a game was as bad as life could get. The glory of those autumn weekend nights might have been the final taste of innocence for us farm kids old enough to drive tractors but still young enough to be stuck in elementary school.

The Auctioneers football team was a thing you could depend on. Real life, we’d learn later, that was a whole different ballgame.

Sound familiar?

There’s Toby and Billy, Sue Jane and the two Tinas, Lannie Mae and Main Street, and the National Guard Armory and the ol’ green and white, the school colors. These are teens who learn to dance (sort of). They endure a principal who is half Joe Friday and half Edgar G. Robinson. Somebody drops a jar in science lab, the one with the snake in formaldehyde. They ask Daddy for the keys and go to the drive-in.

Your memories and mine, simple and sweet.

It’s a time, Don writes – more appropriately, the book’s main narrator writes – that he looks back on “with a tenderness and a sadness that makes me smile.” Those times include that summer of 1959 when they were just boys, imperfect, but having fun. Their last biking summer, their “last summer for being kids and doing kid things and not being ashamed of them,” he writes. “The last summer for exploring the mysteries of life without having to solve them.” 

“Maybe it’s the last one I can look back on with absolutely no regrets — except that it is gone forever, taking the people and the time with it, and leaving only my sentimental memory as a witness that it was ever there at all.”

So it’s been for us all, once upon a beautiful time …

“Piano Days” is a love letter to a special place and time, one long Statler Brothers song.  But it also offers you a mirror to consider how that summer and the precious ones around it come back to you years later in ways you could not have known or even imagined then. 

You can read “Piano Days” or listen to it or, like me, do both. The audiobook is read by Don, so it’s like he’s next to you, telling you about church softball and the county fair and the Christmas parade and all the other things he — and we — did as kids when we were imperfect and youthfully irresponsible, blissfully ignorant, and having fun.

There’s a last time for everything, even barefoot summers. So, allow yourself some time to remember and daydream. It feels good to be a kid again.

Some of us see the grass greener in our neighbor’s yard, while never thinking that we have the option to paint our own grass. America, celebrating another birthday on this Fourth of July, takes a lot of hits, and goodness knows we’ve brought a lot of it upon ourselves. But I love it, warts and all. And wouldn’t you rather start cleaning up here, painting the grass here, instead of anyplace else on earth? We’ve got a pretty good head start, what with the fruited plain and spacious skies from sea to shining sea — if only common sense and elbow grease would come back into style.
Home is what we make it.
I’m thinking of how many people must have this cross stitched and framed on a kitchen wall: “Home Sweet Home.”
But … not everyone grew up safe with a tire swing and a dog and a bike. They had to leave home to find home. Any of us can buy a house and a lot of stuff to put in it. But only things that are free can make it a home.
What about your home away from home? For some, it’s holding a needle and thread or holding a baby or holding the attention of a class filled with students. For others, home is on a tractor or on a stage or in a cockpit or in a press box. It’s the realization of being grown but still feeling as secure as you did in the womb, a conscious knowing that where you are is why you were born.
If you’re really lucky, you know home when you find it, when you feel it. Dorothy went all the way to Oz before she realized her heart’s desire was in her own back yard. George Bailey had to “die” and lose home before finding out his drafty house when filled with friends made him the richest man in town.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or Twitter @MamaLuvsManning