The summer of my sophomore year in high school I worked in Nevada Missouri, helping -nominally- to build my uncle Willoughby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new auto parts store. Nevada (long \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) is a town of about ten thousand, two hours southwest of Excelsior Springs and a handful of miles from Fort Scott, Kansas. Fort Scott was established in the mid-eighteen hundreds as part of our government’s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Manifest Destiny\u00e2\u20ac\u009d program.<\/p>\n
At sixteen, I was painfully shy around kids my own age. Thus, I was happy to move cinder blocks and bolt together metal display shelving, but I dreaded my aunt Mary Jane\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plans. Meet her friends, play with their kids. My uncle Willoughby, my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brother, could see my discomfort and that is when he pulled me aside,
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153As an adult you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll constantly be doing things you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to do. But not now, not this summer.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n
He must have said something similar to his wife because after that, when Mary Jane came by, I no longer had to pretend to be asleep. When my uncle offered, I was thrilled to shoot skeet, eat the cattle drive of steaks that he provided, drive his souped-up yellow pickup truck (no license), and stock up on M-80\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n
Short of being dead, the week we spent at Torroemore is as close as I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll ever get to to that summer in Nevada. I ate meat, though more tomatoes; I shot images, not clay pigeons, and I limited my daily activities to what would make a flagellum happy. Quite simply, I did what I wanted to do, and not one thing more.<\/p>\n
Matthew has made seventeen trips to visit Susan and Jim’s, some alone, many with friends, none of late with us, his parents. He loves his Minnesota trips, to the red house on the hill called Torroemore. The smile on his face when I drop him at Logan is exceeded only by the one he brings home. <\/p>\n
This is the first year in five that he begrudgingly consented to our company. While his need to leave us far behind has never been a mystery, it was only last week that I realized Torroemore has always been his Nevada summer. <\/p>\n
Photo Gallery<\/a> (New Window Opens)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The summer of my sophomore year in high school I worked in Nevada Missouri, helping -nominally- to build my uncle Willoughby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new auto parts store. Nevada (long \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) is a town of about ten thousand, two hours southwest of Excelsior … Continue reading