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.
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In spring of 1958 his family moved out of their little white house (with its little white picket fence) across from the Memphis Municipal Airport. They moved into a new large brick suburban style house in the Graceland subdivision of Whitehaven, just outside of the Memphis city limits. There was a branch of the library within bicycling distance of their new house. It had a plethora of books on extinct fauna.
Library card in hand, he assaulted that plethora. By the time he was nine he understood the most fundamental points of evolution.
The books in the library told him in plain language, right there in black-and-white print, that humankind evolved from an apelike ancestor. Although this totally contradicted what he'd learned in Sunday school, he took the illumination with equanimity born of familiarity with conceptual disillusionment. After all, he had already figured out that there was neither Santa Claus nor Easter Bunny nor Tooth Fairy. The grown-ups had 'fessed up to universal deceit in this regard. Since the toys and chocolate eggs kept coming in spite of all such revelations, it hardly seemed worthwhile to call all adulthood to account for the delightful misconstructions. One must choose one's battles.
Apparently they had simply forgotten to mention the fictional aspects of the "Book of Genesis". It was understandable. Had they not likewise neglected to produce full disclosure on the Stork cover-up? They most likely reckoned he'd figure them out for himself. He filed Adam and Eve away with Santa and the rest.
One can imagine his surprise when he found out that it was still illegal to teach evolution in Tennessee schools. What had seemed a mere slip of notoriously unreliable adult memory was now seen to be a law of the land, enforced with alacrity by the local authorities.
But Bubba was up to the challenge. "Make sure you're right, then go ahead!" that great Tennessean David Crockett had said. So he sailed blithely into heated debates with whole classrooms at Graceland Elementary School, mowing down their arguments like so much verbal Jimson Weed. Some teachers even joined in the fray, though always on the side of Divine Writ. Those few who agreed with Darwin on the matter wisely kept their mouths shut and their tenures secure.
Most of the time, though, the authorities had other fish to fry. "It's just a phase. He'll grow out of it," they said, and went back to worrying about the horrors of rock music, communist liberals, the uppity Negroes.
Teenagers were dancing "lewd and lascivious" dances to boisterous music, and the Puritan Ethic was at an all-time sag. Even the elementary school kids were picking up on it. Rock and Roll was lurking in the schools, bopping into the shopping centers, blaring tinnily from cheap Japanese radios, and cruisin' the burger joints looking for trouble -- or maybe, just maybe, love.
