Asa was typical of the pathos found scattered up and down the old Seaboard Coast Line these days of unemployed poets sitting home, spending their waking hours glued to some Facebook chat or Blog, doing nothing beside what whey really should be doing at fifty seven.
The ober-child never having or wanting to set aside that adolescent age where mommy provides and they blithely consume.
All Asa's life choices were directed toward this inevitable outcome, from the formative years when he manipulated the old colored maid to buy him toys, feigning screaming tantrums if she demurred.
It continued with the art lessons the desperate mother signed him on for to see if she may channel this little church doodler into a direction to his bend. It was of little profit, he painted for a time the dog Bobo, the alps, the still life, the old fisherman after Vincent and shipped them off to relatives in Mississippi and Georgia, never to be hung, found in closets and behind couches when he came for visits.
We know not when Asa took up the pen. Sometime after Arturo entered Wilmore Elementary and all his friends said Arturo draws much better than you. Surmising it must be so based on the Mountain Lions behind the sofa and such, it was about then Asa turned with vigor to sports. Again mother obliged and the hoops were raised, the punt, pass and kicks entered, the little leagues pursued. With ardor unknown, Asa rose to the level of outrunning Jimmy Haines down to the rail and back, crowning him the fastest boy in any grade as far as he was concerned.
He never saw them coming, but they did. It was through the side entrance East they came, Wilson James and his colored boys of above the rim men. First they stormed the gym then headed out to the cinder track and dashed Asa off the hundred, consigning him to the bench and middle distances.
What was left for Asa, the hollow boy before his time, but to revert back to the innocent bottle fed times, the days of ole Sopchoppy, sitting with his best friends Robert and Sam on the river bank, rife with brim, swimming to the far side to watch from the raised dock the day that was never in a hurry to pass.
And so he stayed.
There were perfunctory attempts to return to adulthood, but he found Walden and his civil obedience was there to stay.
"Sopchoppy! Next stop Sopchoppy!"
