"One bright day, shortly after Seaman First Class Jubal Pickett returned home to Natchez, Mississippi from the war, he and his son, Gideon, going on three, went for a walk. Gideon wrapped his chubby little hand around Jubal’s trigger finger and lurched along beside his father with happy determination. It was during this period of time that Jubal had his dream. In his dream, he and Gideon were walking together across a meadow somewhere in Yugoslavia when artillery shells began exploding all around them. Jubal didn’t know what they were doing in Yugoslavia since his tour of duty with the Navy ended early with a sucking chest wound at Pearl Harbor, but that was his dream and there they were. In the instant, without thought, without hesitation, Jubal threw himself on top of his son to protect him with his own body as the shells screamed around them. In actuality, Jubal’s dream was so real he leapt out of bed and cracked his head against the bedside table on his way to the floor. In real life, he would die for his child, and Jubal knew this like he drew breath. The thought came to him that the Old Testament Abraham was one sick son-of-a-bitch. He, Jubal Pickett, loved his son so much that he’d never dare harm him. “Wouldn’t give you a nickel for him, wouldn’t take a million,” Jubal would say with a fond wink in Gideon’s direction. As far as Jubal was concerned, a man who’d kill his own son wasn’t but scum. Anybody’d do that to his own kid ought to be spread-eagled on top a hill of fire ants with corn syrup poured over his skin and his eyelids held open with cactus needles. The day Jubal realized this was the day he stopped believing in the benevolence of any God who would ask such a thing."
EXCERPT 2
"Jubal came from a long line of horse traders, boatmen, roustabouts, roughnecks, and thieves sometime late in the 18th century. His people, originally from the Scottish highlands, found themselves in the blue grass country of what would one day become the state of Kentucky, yet they were not bumpkins, peasants, yes, but canny and shrewd. The progenitor of the family, a man named Sid Pickett, came over as an indentured servant, but he learned horse-trading from his contract master, bested him with cunning deals on the side, and bought his way out before the end of his servitude. An astute observer, he noticed that boats, as opposed to horses, didn’t kick, bite, excrete, or eat, and so he became a member of a breed known up and down the Mississippi River as “Kaintucks”: hard, wild frontiersmen who trusted no one, who drank, fought, and built flatboats that they floated down the Mississippi River loaded with goods. They’d sell their commodities at Natchez, sell the boat for lumber, stuff the cash in their pockets, and walk home along the Natchez Trace, four hundred and forty miserable miles of footpath from Natchez, Mississippi through a little corner of Alabama and on up to Nashville, Tennessee.
Not surprisingly, bandits considered the Trace a mother lode of opportunity. They were merciless men who took the hard earned cash of their victims with impunity, and thought no more of plucking a person’s life than plucking a blade of grass.
More than once did Sid Pickett fight his way out of an ambush, but only once was he bested. Two men waylaid him and took his money. They’d gotten the jump, and they’d hurt him, but they hadn’t killed him, and that was their mistake. He managed to escape and flee, however, and instead of continuing home, George circled back and tracked them down. One of the robbers had walked deeper into the woods for a little privacy. Pickett waited until the man dropped his leggings and squatted, then he bludgeoned the unsuspecting bastard from behind with a stone the size of a land turtle, and damn near tore his head off his neck. He came up behind the other one, too, hammered him with a blow to the back of his neck, and tied the stunned bandit’s hands in front of him before the thief could figure out what was happening. Then Sid grabbed his hatchet, chopped off both his hands, took his money, and left the poor wretch howling in the woods. There was a dark side to Sid Pickett. He conceived of revenge in tragic proportions."
NON FICTION -- Moby Bear
Some years ago, my wife and I lived on a small place in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, on a rise at the base of Ward Mountain. We had sixty acres, six chickens, two horses, a garden that yielded radishes the size of peas, one outhouse, and no telephone. A skunk got the chickens, people in Hollywood forgot who we were, and the house we lived in was so tiny we bumped our heads on the bedroom ceiling. But we were newly in love and learning to live together. Other people had hardships. We had adventures. Our place backed onto two million acres of the Bitterroot-Selway Wilderness, and every animal that lived on the continent lived in our backyard. We rode the same trails as the elk herd, knew where the old whitetail buck hid in the swamp, watched grouse drum in the springtime, and coyote pups pogo along behind their mothers. At night, we'd soak in the hot springs and see every star in the western sky. We even had our own bear.
Judging by the weathered condition of the wood he had clawed on the trunks of trees, he (I always thought of this bear as "he") had lived on the place a lot longer than the two of us; and, judging by the height of the claw marks (A bear stands up on his hind legs to claw a tree), he was a pretty good size for a black bear. My guess was six feet standing straight up. I had no quarrel with him. In fact, I was happy to have him as a neighbor. He kept to himself, which is what bears do, and for years I never even saw him. Oh, I'd see his sign all the time: large rocks flipped over to get to the ants and grubs underneath, fresh claw marks on the trees, pieces of hair pulled off when he crawled under the barbed wire fence, scat the size of softballs. I even heard him once in awhile on the ridge north of the house. He sounded like he had a fierce stomachache, and I imagined he must be getting old to make such a noise, more like a groan than a growl. I always kept a lookout for him, though, especially when I was hunting deer. Sometimes I'd come close. He'd be around or had been around, but he was too sly to be seen. Very few creatures possess the extraordinary sense of hearing and smell that a bear does. The closest I came that I know of was one afternoon when I decided to deliberately look for him. An Athapaskan Indian once told me that if you're hunting a bear the bear knows it, and that evening at dusk I came to believe that the statement was true.
I cut through the willow swamp that bordered the property because I knew he used it from time to time. It was always wet, and on a couple of occasions I actually saw tracks in the mud. They would be fresh, but not fresh enough. A truly fresh track in a swamp would have the water trickling back into it. That day, right there, right then, water was trickling into a print of his right front paw. He had been there within seconds, and I was right behind him. Another track was just a few feet ahead. More mud lay beyond that, but the tracks stopped there. It looked like he veered off over a carpet of broken willow branches. That would leave no sign. Smart bear. He had his radar switched on. I crossed the willow carpet as carefully as I could to avoid snapping a stick, each twig being a potential firecracker of sound. What helped to smother the noise I made was a fifteen foot waterfall which ran off the top of our back pasture. The falls tumbled down wildly over two uprooted trees, and I exited the willow swamp at the base of it. This was a place I visited often. It was a place of peace for me, one where I could sit upwind for great stretches of time and, cloaked by the unruly water, simply watch what came by. Once a whitetail faun passed so close to me I could have touched it, and once I watched a mink hop across the stream.
With the wind in my face and my footsteps muffled by the grass, I climbed the hill next to the falls. At the top of the hill was a copse of pine and aspen. On the other side of the trees was a small clearing, and, on the other side of that, a trail used by elk to take them through the forest and back up the mountain. I crossed the clearing and stopped by the trail. The day was well into dusk by then, time to turn around and head back. In a minute, I said to myself, in a minute. It was so quiet. I listened carefully. I wished my ears were as powerful as those radio receivers deployed to pick up transmissions from deep space.
I knew he was there. By this time it was too dark to see anything except the gray and black shapes of the bushes and trees. And, of course, he was black. He could have been any one of these. He was out there, and all his senses were trained on me. It made me uneasy. You don't want to get too close to a bear, and you don't want one to get too close to you. I didn't move. I thought, "I'll give him time to get away." It wouldn't take him more than a few seconds to clear out, and then I could head back to the house. I waited, didn't move, waited some more. "He must be beyond me by now," I thought. Bears just don't hang around when a human's in the vicinity. So I took a step back towards the house, back in the direction from which I had just come. That step triggered a roar so loud it sounded as if it had been slammed into my ears from stereo headphones turned to full volume. The sound was everywhere, followed by a noise such as the chomping of jaws would make, a sure sign of aggression in a bear. This time I located the sound in front of me. What this meant was that all the while I thought I was tracking him, he had circled around behind and was tracking me. He didn't need to let me know he was there. I swear I think he did it on purpose. He was warning me to back off. I did what he wanted. I retreated backwards a few steps then circled widely to my right as far as possible away from where he was.
The next day a neighbor drove over in his ancient pickup and asked me if I'd had any trouble with bears lately. Frank was an old curmudgeon who herded sheep and lived alone in a trailer about a mile away. One had taken a sheep a couple of days ago, and last night it actually came up to his front steps.
"Want to see somethin' crazy?", he asked.
He took a beer can from the cab of his truck.
"Lookit this," he said.
The beer can had a large hole poked in the top.
"It was that goddamn bear," he continued. "I left a six pack on the front steps when I went out to check the sheep, and that goddamn bear poked holes in the cans and drank up all the beer."
Of course, I didn't believe him, but he had five more empty cans with claw punctures on them that he swore was proof. I told him about my encounter with a bear that same night, and Frank was certain it had to be the same one. This bear was dangerous, he said. It'd lost its fear of men and somebody'd better shoot it before something serious happened.
The next morning there was a fresh pile of bear scat outside our living room window as if a bear had stood there watching us. My wife said she didn't think there was anything to worry about because we were inside and he wasn't, but I said to her to imagine that, to a bear on the other side of the glass, we looked to him the way meat wrapped up in cellophane looks to us. I didn't really believe this and neither did she, not really. It was still spooky, though.
A couple of days later Frank came by again and reported that this time the goddamn bear took his trailer door off its hinges, broke into his refrigerator, and drank another six pack. Frank was in town playing poker at the time. He wanted me to come over and see the damage for myself. Damn if there wasn't a broken front door, claw scratches on the refrigerator, and a mess inside. Frank was going to start sleeping with a twelve gauge shotgun loaded with double ought buckshot. I began to wonder whether, in fact,.we did have a problem on our hands.
The next couple of days were uneventful, that is, if any day spent in country as exhilarating as Montana can be called uneventful. What I meant was there’d been no sign of bear, and there were no calls from Frank of any more trouble. That evening I took my wife to Missoula to catch a flight to New York, but when I got back it was another story. As my headlights swept by the porch, they spooked a bear at the front door. When the lights hit him, he ran and disappeared behind the house. I barely got a glimpse, but there was no doubting what it was. He hadn't broken into the house, but he was about to. The top screen on the screen door was clawed to shreds. When I went around the back of the house I saw that he had broken into the garbage bin, had literally torn the lid off and scattered garbage everywhere. I spoke to Frank the next day, and he reported that the bear had broken into his storage shed and eaten a bag of oats.
"He's a menace," said Frank, and I had to agree. "We gotta stop him before it's too late," Frank added. Yeah, yeah. I agreed again, but this was not something I really wanted to do.
Reluctantly, the next day, I set an ambush. I thawed out a lake salmon I caught earlier in the spring, wrapped it in bacon, put it in a bucket, and poured molasses over it. This was Godiva chocolate to a bear. I chambered my Ruger, thirty ought six, single shot rifle with a two hundred and twenty grain hand load. It was a deadly accurate piece, and a bullet like that in the right place would pretty much stop anything around. I took the bucket out to the swamp and set it down where I'd have a clear lane of fire, then I climbed a hill opposite the target area and sat down with my back against a tree. That way my outline would be broken up, and my scent would be over the bear's head. I put the rifle on my knees and waited. It was early afternoon, an unusually sunny and hot day for October. I knew I'd probably have a long wait ahead of me, but my idea was to get into position way before anything knew I was there. I was comfortable, too comfortable, and warm, too warm, and I proceeded to fall asleep. My eyes grew heavy, my head dropped to my chest, and I was out of there. When I woke up about an hour later, the bucket was overturned, and the bait was gone. Did this bear have enough sense to wait until I actually fell asleep, or was this just some kind of uncanny coincidence? The truth was I was dealing with a very sly critter. You have to admire a bear like that.
The next day I mixed another concoction of raw salmon, bacon, and molasses, put it in the same spot, and climbed back up to my tree. The day was a little cooler, and I purposely underdressed to keep myself alert. I sat and waited, and waited, and waited, an hour, two hours, going on three, and suddenly there he was. One second the clearing was empty, and the next he was in it. He simply materialized with his nose in the food bucket. He was an awesome animal, bigger than I had imagined, three hundred pounds or more, and his thick, black hide seemed to flow as if it were underwater. It glistened in the sunlight like an oil slick. The bulk of him was staggering, so much strength, so much mass. I saw no reason to kill such an extraordinary animal except that he had trespassed into the human sphere and so, according to the accumulated wisdom of men in the woods, he had become dangerous and therefore had to die.
I did not like having been chosen the executioner. It was like getting an order to be on a firing squad. Even as I lifted the rifle slowly to my shoulder I wished I were somewhere else. Even more, I wished the bear were somewhere else, somewhere way back up in the mountains where he could mosey around without a bounty on his massive head. But, at that moment, I didn't think I had a choice, so I centered the crosshairs just back of his shoulder and eased off the safety. He was sideways to me, an easy shot, two pounds of trigger pressure away from instant mortality. His snout was still in the bucket. What would he know? One minute his mouth would be full of something delicious, and the next one would be oblivion. Chances were he'd die happier than I would. Just squeeze the trigger, bucko, and save your neighbors a lot of aggravation. But, I didn't want to, and I could not. He took his snout from the bucket and looked up in my direction. I'm sure he didn't see me because bears don't see very well. It was simply a reflex reaction, a quick check of the territory before he finished his meal. He put his snout back in the bucket, snuffled around, and ambled off through the thicket. I snicked the safety back on, retrieved my bucket, and returned to my house. Frank would have had a major heart attack. I made myself some supper, and went to bed early. About three o'clock in the morning somebody pounded on the front door. It was Frank, and he was whirling.
"I got him, goddamnit, I got him, " he hollered. "Y'gotta come up to my place and see this!"
I climbed into my truck and followed him. All the way to Frank's place I wavered between relief and sorrow. His lights were on, and, sure enough, there was the body of a bear sprawled across his front steps. Frank had baited him with cans of beer, and he had taken the bait.
"Got him right in the middle of a can of Bud," Frank crowed.
And he had. Except that this bear was smaller than the one I had seen that afternoon, and this one was cinnamon colored. Also his teeth were worn down, and he was kind of skinny, an older bear and none too healthy, the sort of bear that would trespass for any kind of a meal. He was not the one I had baited into the swamp. I stayed up the rest of the night helping Frank skin out the bear. Frank offered me a roast as soon as he had the butchering done. I just didn't want to disappoint him. I said yeah, great, but I really didn't want one.
MEMOIR IN PROGRESS -- The Education Of A White Boy
MORGAN STATE AND THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS
Two songs, both hymns, and only two have the power to bring me to tears: We Shall Overcome and The Marine Corps Hymn. Each branch of the military has its own song. Only the Corps has a hymn. Its third and final stanza follows.
If the army and the navy
Ever look on Heaven's scene
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines
The Marines. The Chosen Few. The Righteous. . Heaven's Own. Those Pearly Gates: Our celestial Duty Station. In boot camp on Parris Island we sang it every night as the last thing we did before hitting the rack. When we sang it we ascended. We filled our lungs with air, and we ascended. Seventy-five testosterone fueled boots -- Uncle Sam's Misguided Children -- reporting for duty. We were invincible. That's what they told us. That's what we believed.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
We Shall Overcome was sung like a benediction at the end of meetings during the early years of the civil rights movement when Black and White together would form a circle, put our arms around each other's shoulders, sway gently, and sing out with all our hearts. Regardless of how the day went it ended in love and hope. We had purpose. We had goal. We would make the world a better place. We had been called.and we accepted.
Both hymns continue to fuel the courage to stand tall in my own way for my own beliefs because when something is right you feel it deep down in your guts, and if you don't do anything about it you are a coward and you must live as a coward forever. What the Marine Corps taught me, and then what the civil rights movement taught me was that my beliefs, if I held them, meant that I had to act on them. I had to bear witness. If I didn't deep in my heart I would know that I was a coward. I could never live that way in peace.
Throughout my years at Morgan I was still in the Marines and would be until graduation. I finished active duty then served my reserve commitment with a combat engineer battalion in Baltimore: reconnaissance training at Little Creek, Virginia; amphibious warfare training on Vieques (then a naval bombing range; now an elegant resort); explosives at Courthouse Bay, Advanced Infantry Training at Camp Lejeune, other places, other things. It didn't kill me, and I'm the better for it. For six years I stayed Marine Corps ready, a stretch that happened to coincide with the burgeoning civil rights movement. About that same period of time, maybe a little earlier, Rosa Parks stood tall in refusing to move to the back of the bus, I, a slick sleeve grunt, stood on that parade field at graduation from Parris Island with the full knowledge that I would not desert my friends or the creed I worked so hard to earn.
The Marines taught me, "Remain calm. Return fire." The civil rights movement taught me, "Remain calm. Remain calmer."
I didn't do much. I regret I didn't do more. But I did what I did, and I'll do it again if called. At 74 my body is weaker, but my convictions are stronger. Fear I felt when younger has gradually disappeared. To quote John Garfield at the end of Body and Soul, "What're you gonna do, kill me? We all die."
WHY I WENT TO MORGAN AND WHY I STAYED THERE
I had never planned to stay there. I certainly had never planned to go there. After all, only colored people went there. But I was white. And it was in the south. The fifties were only yesterday. My Uncle Frank cringed when he heard their music. "Goddamn jungle..." he'd mutter. OK, since I had never planned to go there, and I had never planned to stay there, what was I doing there and why had I stayed? In the Spring of 1962, Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland, had a student body of 2,600 students, all but two of them -- a nun and one eccentric co-ed -- Black. For a Jewish boy coming of age in this era there were three non-negotiables: circumcision, Bar Mitzvah, and a college diploma, preferably in law, medicine, or orthodontia. These three were existential imperatives. The Hebrew trifecta. Without them a male child would not exist as a Jew.
I should have had my college diploma in 1962 having graduated high school in 1958. though I tripled my degree of difficulty by flunking out three times. I got an A in English, a C in philosophy, and an F in everything else, including ROTC and phys. ed., rebelling against authority being one of my strong suits. Given this, reasons still remaining murky, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Once on Parris Island my Drill Instructor bellowed in my face, "What’re you doin in my Marine Corps, maggot?" "Sir, it's safer than being at home, sir!" The words just came blurting out. Home life had been precarious to say the least. My mother designated it a free fire zone. Any object that could be used as a weapon – baseball bat, hanger, cane, hairbrush, knife – was if she could get close enough. Once she went after my brother with a baseball bat. He jumped out of the way, and she split the top of a vanity. Anyway, my DI's expression was one of utter disdain. "Get outta my sight, maggot!" he sneered.
I trained as a combat engineer, and now once again walked civilian streets with few skills except how to booby trap an anti-tank mine and freeze while a sand flea crawled in my ear. What now? I thought about going back on active duty, but authority -- remember that one? -- still not my strong suit. What else? Drug store clerk? Produce manager at the chain grocery? Custodian at the local public school? Jews didn't do these jobs!
A neighbor, a white woman, worked in the Dean's office at Morgan and suggested I give it some thought. Dean Whiting, Dean of Students, was a reasonable man. Call him. I did, and without any memorable thoughts on a hot June day found myself crossing the quad to the administration building. Its bright white Grecian columns blinded me. I remember squinting to see and the feeling of my legs climbing the steps. Once inside the coolness of the interior settled around me. Summer school had not yet started. The halls were empty. I was probably wearing desert boots so my crepe soles made no sound. Neither did anything else. The quiet of an empty warehouse. Where was the dean's office? OK, there it is. Straighten up. Let's do this.
Dean Whiting wore a sport coat, tie, and really gentle smile. His office was full of books. I felt at ease in a way I never feel in a room without books. I don't trust you unless there's a stack of books on the floor beside your chair as well as your bedside table, preferably, each one about something else. I can't remember the details of our conversation but the upshot of it was that he allowed me to enroll in two courses for summer school, both English, I'm sure. The idea was that if I did well he would consider me a provisional student meaning I'd be allowed to enroll in a regular semester for four courses, twelve credits. We'd go on from there, see where we're at, what we'd do. Well, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to ace those courses, all six of them, because, of course, since Morgan was a colored school it was an easy school. I'd score good grades then transfer to a good school, a white school. That was the plan. However, when the time came for me to transfer -- I had scored five A's and one B -- something had changed. I didn't consider myself politicized (I doubt I even thought about it), but Rosa Parks had refused to stand up, Negro college students from North Carolina had refused to leave a white lunch counter, and Malcolm was called Malcolm on campus even though most of the Morgan community did not yet want a separatist nation. Martin Luther King was Martin. Most students at Morgan were working towards a piece of the American pie, conservative dress – sport coat, tie, not a pair of jeans anywhere. Everybody carried a briefcase, coeds carried pocketbooks and wore white gloves when appropriate. Sometimes you’d see a co-ed sporting a Jackie Kennedy pill box hat perched perfectly and the faculty, all of whom had attended schools like Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, returned to the community and dedicated themselves to help their folks do just that. The campus was vibrant in ways I had never before experienced. Black Power hadn't yet appeared but it was on its way. Stokely was making himself known. Black Power, when it finally surfaced, made perfect sense.
The true magic of it all was Morgan's faculty. Encyclopedic knowledge delivered with the passion of a preacher. The profs were hungry to do it, and the students were hungry to get it. TED Talks didn’t exist at the time, but had they it would have seemed that every lecture was a TED Talk. I was beginning to know things, and the more I knew the more I wanted to know, the more I did know, those delightful subtleties that come with rigorous, creative thought. I read James Baldwin's "Another Country" and understood it. Morgan was not an ideological campus -- it was an intellectual and creative one -- still, I read slave narratives, was introduced to characters like Marcus Garvey, writers like Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, Charles Chestnutt-- the entire Harlem Renaissance -- James Weldon Johnson's brilliant, "God's Trombones", and Chaucer's tales; the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley and that of Emily Dickenson; Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas, Hawthorne, Hester Prynne; the art of Romare Beardon; the frescoes of Giotto; the music of Scott Joplin with a whisper of John Cage. The point is: I learned twice as much as I would have at a "good" school.
The point is: I stayed, grew, and graduated.
A Fulbright was awarded.
Graduate school at Yale was next.
I did just fine.
A GIRL I ONCE KNEW AT MORGAN
I remember her walk. I'd be sitting in the student union when she'd come in, smile, and walk over to me. She had a wonderful walk -- slow and easy, fluid, without a hint of effort. She'd walk over to me and then we'd sit there and talk, about nothing much. We just talked. Talk was easy, too. It was January of 1963, and I was in rehearsal for the first performance of my first play. She was in the Ira Aldridge Players, the school's drama society. Now that I was sort of a playwright, so was I. I don't remember what she did in the group nor do I remember how we met, but being in the club broke down barriers, and we began to talk. Her voice sounded so pleasant with just a hint of a southern accent. She was slender and very dark. I was Jewish and pale as a biscuit. We must have had crushes on each other, but I remember being with her was like a slow canoe ride across a lake rather than the turbulence of shooting whitewater. I don't remember being on guard for rocks, but I must have been, and she must have been, too. After all, it was 1963 in a southern city. She was Black, and I was White. You can fill in the blanks, but I'm here to tell you it was innocent and pristine. We were still children of the fifties.
Somewhere in here Dr. Turpin told me he'd made arrangements for the play to be produced in New York. The Ira Aldridge players, cast and crew, would be headed for the bright lights of Off-Broadway on stage at the Columbia Teacher's College way uptown but New York City nonetheless. Marion and I would be hundreds of miles from our hometown. I doubt that was lost on either of us. This is what I remember: nothing about rehearsals or performance but a taxi ride with Marion Tyree down to Greenwich Village to see Jean Genet's "The Blacks" with a young actor named Louis Gossett. Another couple shared the cab with us: a friend and fellow student from Morgan, another Marine, Reg Kearney, and his date, a coed from Barnard. I still don't know how he managed to pull that one off in the limited time we were in the city, but he did. Reggie had hit the trifecta: she was zaftig, white, and Jewish. Reggie was in heaven. We were all in the back seat, so I sat as close to Marion as I'd ever been. I cautiously put my arm around her, and she settled in. Nestled in. It was a small move and gentle, and felt so right. After the show (which was electrifying) we walked to a restaurant, and, for the first time, we held hands, right there, out in the open, we held hands. At first I thought every set of eyes in New York City was on us, and then I realized none of them were. We held hands and walked to the restaurant, and I was happy. I was a produced playwright, and I was holding hands with Marion Tyree.
When Marion’s grandchildren were grown she told them about me. “He was a white boy,” she said. “No, grandma, no,” they screamed. “And he was Jewish,” she said. “Grandma, no,” they yelped in disbelief. Then came the kicker.”And he was a good kisser, too,” she said, and laughed when they squealed and went wide-eyed. “Oh, no, grandma, you didn’t!” “Yes, I did,” said Marion, totally delighted with their reaction. She and I still talk by phone once in awhile, although we haven’t seen each other since those days at Morgan. Still, Marion Tyree remains one of my most treasured memories.
