This story first appeared in the November 25, 2010, issue of The Trussville Tribune.
A book review is not generally the kind of thing I write, but I’m making somewhat of an exception here. I say “somewhat” because this isn’t totally a review. It’s partly a tribute to a friend.
I just finished reading Clyde Bolton’s memoir, Hadacol Days, A Southern Boyhood, and loved it. With each page, he drew me into the world of his youth, and I figuratively strolled along with him through the 1940s and 50s streets of Statham, Georgia. I didn’t just read Clyde’s book; I experienced it, and it gave me a different perspective on someone I greatly admire.
I first met Clyde over three-and-a-half decades ago when I was a high school junior and briefly dated the eldest of his three sons, Mike. The Boltons had just moved to Trussville into the beautiful custom-built house they still live in today, and Mike wanted to show it off. His mom, Sandra, rightfully excited about her new home, happily gave me a tour.
An aspiring writer even then, I was in awe of Clyde. I had seen his picture and read his articles on the sports pages of The Birmingham News ever since I could remember. I couldn’t have been more tongue-tied if Mike had introduced me to yet-to-be-impeached President Nixon.
I clearly recall standing in the Boltons’ den as Mike pointed upward at the loft where his dad wrote (and still writes), but I don’t recall climbing the stairs to it. Since I was feeling a little jittery in the presence of an individual I considered newspaper royalty, it probably would have been too much for me anyway.
But that connection ended abruptly when Mike stood me up for another girl after a high school playoff game in the Fall of ‘73, a move I’m tickled to say his dad now gives him grief for. When Mike visited me at college a couple of years later and told me “the other woman” had broken up with him, I couldn’t help but be pleased in a semi-vengeful sort of way… But I digress.
Even though I’ve known who Clyde is for decades, an actual friendship between us has evolved only over the past four or five years, since he and I have been serving on the city’s library board together. Not only do I feel fortunate to have a friend who is an encourager and an example to me as a writer, I also know that Clyde is one of those friend-to-the-end kind of guys who’s always willing to lend a hand when needed. I can only hope I’m half the friend to him that he is to me.
Now don’t take this wrong, but Clyde’s latest memoir is one of those books I kept putting down because I didn’t want to finish it. I wanted to savor it. I read it slowly over the course of a couple of weeks, even re-reading passages in order to squeeze every possible drop of goodness from Clyde’s descriptive prose. Since I’m the product of a small-town upbringing in many ways similar to the one he described, his “Hadacol Days” tales charmed me.
If any of my other author friends had written such a delightful book, I’d log onto e-mail and send a congratulatory note. But I can’t do that with Clyde. He doesn’t have e-mail. Heck, he doesn’t even have a computer, much less a cell phone or any other of those newfangled gadgets with which most of my friends communicate these days. He still uses a vintage Underwood typewriter (yes, the manual kind) to do his writing, and when he talks on the telephone, he uses an old-fashioned landline.
Clyde calls it being practical; I call it being a stubborn old goat that refuses to join the rest of us in the 21st Century. But between you and me, I think he’s probably got the right idea. And truth be told, I’d take a hundred more old goats just like him.
Somewhere in the Middle 