OK, I'm back but I don't know for how long.

This woke me up at 3:30 this morning and wouldn't let me go, so had to post it. Just images I remember or was told about.

A great deal of the land in Oklahoma is red clay. But down near Atoka and Antlers, which sit in the first of the foothills of the Kiamchi mountains in the southeast corner of the state, it's white clay. And if you're on a country road in a heavy rain, it's as slick as ice.

You won't get stuck in it too easily because it's not very porous, but you'll definitely slide into the ditch and you'll definitely get stuck there, believe me. So you get out and help push and that wet white clay is spinning up from the wheels and eventually everyone looks like the ambiguous race from "Lathe of Heaven." Just one image from my childhood.

There are worms down in those mountains. Big worms. Worms 6 feet long, yellow in color, twice the diameter of a pencil, snake-like, with a fierce dedication to not being taken from the ground. And even after they're chopped up, the pieces will fight you to keep off the hook when you use them fishing. Another image.

My sister is moving into her seventies and recently made up a photo album of family members from the forties and fifties, a lot of them of me. Most were from my mother's albums. Looking at those pictures (many of them sepia colored from age), I have the memories of seeing them before as well as being there when they were taken in some cases.

There's my father with me. He's looking stern, wearing overalls with a straw hat, standard dress for a farmer in that area. He had mostly moved on from that uniform by the time I remember him well, but I do remember him always wearing a hat when he went out.

There's one of me, three or four, playing in front of a tar-paper shack. They'd put up a house consisting of a frame with boards nailed on them. Then, to keep water and the wind out, they would put tar-paper (like they put under shingles) over the entire house. The more affluent poor people might even put shingles on the entire house, but not many had that kind of money, so they just did the tar-paper.

Tar-paper is a marvelous sustance, cheap yet effective. Has a few problems, however. In hot weather it becomes sticky. Nothing like getting you hair into it as a kid. And when the dust blows it sticks to your house so you have to hose it down occasionally to try and clean it. When it became completely filthy, they just nailed another layer on.

Most of those shacks didn't have windows and if they did the people couldn't afford glass but used translucent oil-cloth to fill them. Didn't allow much light and they generally weren't openable, but better than the dark, dark house I vaguely remember.

There's one of my mother when she was in her early twenties, before children, possibly before husband, a stranger to me. One of my brother, 15 or 16 years old, standing cockily with one of his friends in a photo probably taken in a photoshop (don't have those anymore), maybe drunk, out for a night of hijinks and trouble.

A story I overheard. In the forties we still have segregation in many places. Even at bars. But some of the towns in Oklahoma were too small to support two bars so the whites and "colored" shared one. The blacks had their own door (in the back, of course) and held their revelries in the back room, only coming into the main room to stand at the end of the bar, almost "hat-in-hand", to get a bottle and return to the back room.

Sometimes, however, bars being bars and drunks being drunks, there was some argument which sprung up around that end of the bar. Soon there would be a fight as the drunk blacks finally got enough condescension from the drunk whites or the drunk whites finally got enough "uppityness" from the drunk blacks. The cops would arrive and cart away some of the blacks and the parties would continue.

Bars down there generally sold moonshine. The people couldn't afford better. Sold it in fruit jars, deposit on the jar so it would be brought back, actually more valuable than what they held. Liquor was illegal in Oklahoma in certain counties but down in the hills that was usually ignored. But occasionally the law (usually federal) rose up and made trouble.

The law would sweep in and shut a place down and within a day a new bar, in a new place, would spring up. And everyone seemed to know where it was automatically. There were so many closed down bars in the small towns around that I can remember a lot of the businesses (hardware, clothing stores, etc.) had a bar instead of a counter for the clerks to work behind. Never thought about it until now.

You know, I was a liberal when I was young and idealistic. And I suppose if I had been more zealous, I might have tried to be part of that push to end segregation. But I was a little too young and a lot too selfish. I was much more concerned with my own welfare than other people's freedoms.

Like in the sixties. My major concern at that time was not finishing college (although I did) or getting married (which I did) or having children (which I did). My major concern at that time was to stay out of Kennedy's and Johnson's (Democrats?) war. You know, the one over in Asia? The only one this country has ever lost? Vietnam?

In the county I grew up in and registered in, a young man had three choices when he graduated high school. He could go to college, go into the armed forces, or go to work in the oil fields. If you couldn't go to college, didn't have the money or the grades, most young men chose the armed forces over working in the oil fields. It's that bad of work.

I didn't know it until later, but my county never had to draft anyone during the war. They filled all their quota with voluntary recruits. But, like I say, I didn't know that then and every day was a day waiting for your call to come. Unless you did something about it.

There was an exemption for college students, so I went to college. When that was taken away, there was still an exemption for married men, and I had just gotten married (a WHOLE 'nother story, believe me). When they took that exemption away, there was still one for men with children, and my wife had just given birth to David. So, maybe, my son saved my life.

Anyway, another blogger said that the best part of blogging was that you were free to discuss what you wanted and nobody could even tell if it was true or not. I'm not saying I've lied in any of this, or even exaggerated any of it, but there could be some of these things that are literary additions. But I'm not saying which and I don't have to.