A Wonderful Childhood in Fairview Alpha

If you are a parent and ever considered writing a book to tell your children or grandchildren about your childhood, you should read this book first. The author filled this book with stories about his family, his childhood friends, and their adventures in a small southern community. The book started as a way of telling grandchildren about the times and a way of life unknown to them, but led to something more far-reaching. Living in the ”Big House” and the expectations of being a member of a privileged family in a small community are revealed. Children who grew-up playing on the sidewalks of the cities will read about life as a boy growing up surrounded by horses and cows in rural Louisiana during the 1940s and 50s. He shows the impact of hate crimes on white families prior to the Civil Rights Act. His father and grandfather are pictured as heroic figures. The author writes: The small community where everyone waves at each other on the highways, dirt roads, and to people sitting on their porches does not exist anymore except in the images of my mind. But the ethical and moral standards I learned there still exist in good families. Some of my high school friends have moved away, some are dead, some are successful, some are failures, some are happy and some exist as wonderful memories. Deep in my soul I have always felt misplaced in the cities where I have lived. The call of the small Fairview Alpha community has tempted me to return time and time again. A person always wants to go home. There's a gravitational force that pulls at one's heart. Memories of the farm, open pastures, horses, cows, and the less confining air of childhood are ever present in my consciousness. Born in Fairview Alpha, one was expected to live his life there, marry another protestant, die in Fairview Alpha, and be buried next to his or her grandparents and parents. My place was already set aside in the graveyard beside the Baptist church. A vigorous assessment of my family revealed the family didn’t fit into the community that had developed around its businesses. Both parents and grandparents harbored ideas and a way of life that didn’t conform to that of others in the community. It was more like a forced fit. A mismatched philosophy of life was never discussed outside the family because the foundation of their values was the respect for all men and women and their work. It’s my hope that future descendants will not be ignorant of their family’s past, ideas, what they stood for, their successes and their failures. With the changes in the transportation system and geographic shifts of businesses, the extended family has almost disappeared in America. The families of my childhood, where no one went to a nursing home or hired a tutor or babysitter because mothers, fathers, grandparents, sisters and brothers cared for each other, have disappeared from the landscape. In some sections the author notes that he regrets some things. As life departs, everyone will regret something he wished he or she had or hadn’t done. Most regrets center on family and relationships because in the end that is the major force in one’s soul and mortality. The author states, “The desire to return home manifested itself many times in my yearning to buy a farm or small acreage in town for building a family compound with the ability to provide free land for Karen's and my children to build their own homes near us. In the city, and with the demands on children, this was an impractical idea. Clearly that idea came from that desire for the extended family and the open fields in the community of my origin.”