400k wds, some neologisms. Story of a young bohemian bawn and bred in the briar patch that lay between the borders of St. Elvis Era and the Eleusinian Feels of alternity.
                                                                                  The Dreamtime
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
       "C'mon Bee-um-bope."
       Bubba toddled along behind his grandfather, watching the sweat drip from under the old man's brown straw Fedora and trickle down his neck to join the large dark patch of damp that made the shirt cling to the middle of his back.  The toddler didn't know why Pappy Mac called him "Bee-um-bope", had no idea what it meant or whence it derived. Out of Pappy's imagination, probably. Pappy Mac seemed to always be using words nobody ever heard of.Â
(In hindsight, not 20-20 but rather more than a bit blurred, bedazzled, and bedeviled after some fifty or sixty plus he nailed it – in hindsight, buoyed by a half century of study and acute cute cute verbal skills gauged at the upper two per cent of the Whorl, it had to be a Leprechaun dialect.)
       Finally they stopped. Bubba waited while his grandfather studied the ground carefully. Grownups often stopped and thought that way before doing things. The little boy wondered if they would ever teach him the magic of that effective pause.
       "Here we go, Bee-um-bope," the old man said, slinging the shovel from his shoulder. "We gonna dig right here to the side of this molehill. There's worms everywhere, but always the most ones around molehills. Not right in the middle of it, but to the side of it. Mole's already ate up all the worms in the middle of the molehill. Moles eat worms, y'see, so they always know where all the big fat ones are."
       He jabbed the point of the shovel into the ground and pried up the sod. Then he jabbed it again and set his heel to it, pushing it deep into the spongy soil. When he turned it up, they could see a number of worms wiggling half-exposed.
       "Just look at them worms in that clay. Bookoos of 'em."
       "Don't look like clay."
       Waal, course it ain't the same as the modeling clay you have in your playbox at home. This here's real clay."
       Oh."
       Real Mi'ssippi clay."
       Can I dig them out now, Pappy Mac?"
       "Go ahead, Bee-um-bope."
       Bubba dug into the dirt with his fingers, picking the worms out one by one and dropping them into a Dixie cup he'd brought.
       They caught twenty-five bream that day. Bubba loved going fishing in his grandfather's pond. His Dad would go out with his uncles to Sardis Lake and bring back maybe ten or eleven crappies, bass, and catfish. Bubba wondered why they went to all the trouble when they could catch twice as many fish here in the pond.
