Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Little Stevie may be sneaking around here with his BB gun

Photo by Will H McMahan on Unsplash

New connections can come with surprising tentacles. Some quite old. They can reach out, grab a person, and shake loose old memories forgotten for years. After Juanita Clark read my Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, she tracked me down and we began a correspondence based principally on the fact that we once shared the same small Oklahoma town.

She was a longtime, highly respected, beloved teacher. I was a student who missed making connections with Mrs. Clark and thereby failing to fall under her spell years ago. That was my great loss.

Loss and love are my memoir’s themes—losses, great and small, and what they can do to a person over a lifetime. They came early and often, just kept coming for the entirety of a life, but the longest-lasting, hardest-to-accept were those of that small town—Nowata, Oklahoma—and those I loved there. One was right under my nose and I did not realize the effect on me until Mrs. Clark raised this man from the grave.

She reconnected me with him, as if she had taken an eraser to the decades, and I was once again in the small house at the corner of Cedar Street and Osage Avenue, and George Gannaway lived next door and unwittingly led me to learn one of the most valuable lessons anyone can receive: When and how to apologize for a wrong.

Mrs. Clark taught United States History for years, first in high school where I would have had the good fortune to come under her tutelage if my veterinarian father had not been transferred by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Sacramento, California, in the middle of my sophomore year. She subsequently moved to the junior high, following the birth of her son George. This allowed her to give him the extra time and attention that she would not have been able to provide given the many activities a small-town high school teacher must sponsor and support. George’s gain. My loss.

But I had Mama, a former teacher with a master’s degree in mathematics who also kept the books and Daddy straight for a dozen years when he had a private veterinary medical practice. Mr. Gannaway had kept the books for Clark Hardware, an independent hardware that was the adult equivalent of the candy store to us kids. (I may write about my memories of Clark Hardware, and though long gone like so much in Juanita’s and my Nowata, I still wonder if Juanita’s husband, Richard, could have taught even a mechanical and hardware dunce such as myself to become a good employee.)

After Mr. Gannaway died in 1964, Juanita kept the books for the store, gave George a head start in his learning life (as did George’s work in the hardware store itself), and had the willingness and time to lead Nowata’s gifted-student program (130+ IQ required). She was able to help students gain entrance to MIT, Harvard, Pepperdine, Southern Cal, and Southern Methodist, and other schools. Sherry Wilson, who is now a high school counselor, has never forgotten: “Love Mrs. Clark,” she told me in an email. “She was my eighth-grade U.S. History teacher and was very kind to me when a girl was being mean to me. She also hired me as an assistant working with the Gifted Program while I was getting my master’s degree. She is one of my all-time favorite teachers!”

I can go Sherry one better: George Gannaway was the all-time favorite neighbor. OK, the competition may not have been stiff. Mr. Gannaway raised chickens—he is my personal Chicken George (the real one to me, not Alex Haley’s Roots character)—and my neighbor when I moved from Nowata to Sacramento just happened to rob banks. I should have shared with him the lesson I learned from Mr. Gannaway, though my Sacramento neighbor’s offense may have been worse than mine.

I once shot one of my Chicken George’s chickens (only with a BB gun, mind you, and not above the shoulders). This, after Chicken George had given me permission to take potshots at the sparrows that continually ate the chicken feed those babies needed to lay eggs, which I sometimes filled in for Chicken George and collected. Mr. Gannaway was nothing like Haley’s Chicken George who bred fighting chickens. (That sounds like an oxymoron but is not; with metal spurs attached to feet, the birds could be deadly.)

I never knew May Conley Gannaway, Chicken George’s wife, but Mama and Daddy did. Mrs. Gannaway died in 1947, the year after I was born. I do imagine, however, that Mama trotted me next door and rubbed me in Mrs. Gannaway’s nose. She was pretty proud of her Little Stevie, at least initially. I think that may have worn off over the years.

Mama and Daddy taught me respect my elders, do what they told me (except rob banks). Mr. Gannaway was a responsible citizen and I do not think ever had to warn me to shoot only the little sparrows, not the large chickens, who were fenced in and had a nice coop. I think I helped clean their home sometimes, which would fall in line with my Little-Stevie work at the animal hospital. I cleaned dog cages for Daddy. As the unpaid son of a vet—allowance excepted—it would not have set the right example if Little Stevie had been harming fowl. What’s next, kittens? And then what, humans? That was more or less the progression of Jeffery Dahmer, famous killer in my Northeast Ohio.

Somehow or other, Chicken George determined I may have fired a foul shot and hit one of his fowl. I do not know how he knew, but I always knew that it was best to confess. I have spent my life guilt-ridden. I knew what I had to do. Misfiring is not a viable excuse.

When Daddy asked—visions of his razor strop dancing in his head—what I was going to do about my situation, I replied: I am not going to do that again. Not the right answer. Daddy told me that was not what he had asked. He asked what was I going to do. I do not believe I would have qualified as one of Mrs. Clark’s gifted students. But I got it.

I visited Chicken George and told him I had shot one of his feathery babies and I had no excuse but assured him I would not do it again. Mr. Gannaway, man that he was, accepted my apology, did not cancel his subscription to the Nowata Daily Star, which I delivered to him, and told me that he would still pay me to mow his yard. He even said that he appreciated all the sparrows I had killed for him over the years. At least I had not caused any chicken afterlife running around with heads cut off. I had some principles.