One of my mother’s post-divorce suitors was my Uncle Buster, Wayne Martin’s best friend. I didn’t know at the time they were dating, only that Buster began regularly changing the fluids on my Chevette and watching Kansas basketball with me my senior year. We regularly argued about the latter, as I’d become a fan of the Arkansas Razorbacks. My reasoning was simple: I’d decided I was going to go to the University of Arkansas. As an attempt at finding any of my family outside the one I knew, I’d connected with my cousins Nicki and Becky, daughters of my Aunt Joyce who were roughly my age and lived in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I regularly visited them as well as my other family on Petit Jean Mountain nearer to Fayetteville with my Grandma Ruby, my mother’s mother and Joyce’s sister. Uncle Buster broke up with my mother before the end of my senior year, and I didn’t go to the University of Arkansas.
Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties