elizabethlevett

Nothing good will ever come of that boy. That’s what everybody used to say back home. That boy, Lonnie is lost, he really is, he’s just a lost soul, poor thing. That’s what we all used to say.

He never was very strong, always sickly, always down with something. And he never was the sharpest tool in the shed either. If you ask me, it’s that mother of his. His daddy’s been long gone since Lonnie was just a baby and you know it can’t be easy raising up a boy on your own with no father. That’s right. He just packed up his whiskey and his trunk of samples and took himself off. She never was the same after that. But if you ask me, she drove him away, her and her ways. Nothing was ever good enough for that one. Still and all, like I said, it couldn’t have been easy. And how she doted on that boy! Always fussing over him, wiping his nose for him, and fixing his collar. That child never could get out of her sight for more than a minute. No, we never did figure Lonnie had a chance, poor thing, we said. I mean, maybe he could’ve been a deacon, maybe. Or, more likely a greeter over at the Walmart, the one all the girls feel sorry for but don’t want to date or anything like that.

Lonnie grew up shiftless, scared of his own shadow but always coming up with some scheme or another. And the stories he used to make up! Nobody could imagine how it was he ended up going to the state college! You’d have to wonder if that mama of his did his homework for him. Still, it looks like old Lonnie’s making a name for himself after all. I tell you; Uncle Billy just about spit his upper plate across the room when we saw Lonnie on TV. None of us back home ever figured Lonnie’d be up there in the state house, of all things, and running for Congress.

(Block print and collage by author.)