If you’re looking to read about a simple, innocent, unremarkable child, you’ve come to the right place. This, my seventh volume of memoir, goes way back into the first phases of my life in the 1940s and 50s when I was a non-person, an ectoplasmic Id, a mere microbe in a nebulous, benign world tremendously different than the mad jungle it is today.

In my blessedly silly story, you can forget about popular stereotypes of traumatized psyches and anguished ordeals about being gay because there weren’t any. The little dramas of my childhood were your usual existential conundrums: self vs. other, mythology vs. reality, awareness vs. cluelessness, the fine points of human life. In my early years, I didn’t find answers to those questions, but by the end of adolescence, I seem to have worked around them to graduate as a reasonably cognizant, happy, if still naive person. How many folks feel blest in that way?

At first, I envisioned KID STUFF as several short chapters built around the various stages and environments of my childhood. However, when I got started, the narratives expanded with the complexity of my young life. Here are three Nowlin Road (Indiana) installments, two Southlawn Circle chapters from civilized Texas, three from my long exile in Arkansas at Penney Hill out in the middle of nowhere, and four more from a new High School in the little town of Ashdown.

1. Nowlin Road I – The Id-Kid (birth in 1942 to age five)
2. Nowlin Road II – Big Bro (ages 5 to 8)
3. Nowlin Road III – Playmate (ages 8 and 9)
4. Southlawn I – Sudden Sabbatical (age 10)
5. Southlawn II – A Dorkier Dork (age 11)
6. Penney Hill I – Two Little Savages (age 12-13)
7. Penney Hill II – Creative Juices (age 13-14)
8. Penney Hill III – Writing a Life (age 15-16)
9. Ashdown High I – Short Shorts (age 16)
10. Ashdown High II – Love Thy Neighbor (age 17)
11. Ashdown High III – Trying to Forget (age 17 1/2)
12. Ashdown High IV – The Valedictator (age 17 1/2-18)

To download the whole volume of “KID STUFF, A Memoir of Chronic Innocence,” click here.

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