Cousins & Conversations
In 1974 my mom and dad had rented a house on Cafe Line Road in Albany, Louisiana only about a mile away from our cousins from the Payne family. Keith and Kenny were the two youngest Payne sons and they were about the same age as me and my older brother Ronnie Bruce.
We all went to the local public school and rode the same school bus every day and occasionally our parents would let us get off the bus at each other's house to play together.
On one such day, the Payne boys got off the school bus at our house and me and my brother and our cousins played football in our yard. I had a store-bought helmet that I had drawn on with a marks-a-lot to create the logo from the Stanford Indians (this was before colleges went woke) and I pretended that I was Jim Plunkett.
During a break in play, me and my cousin Kenny whom we called Bo stood in the yard and talked about their recent family vacation. He told me of a family trip to Tennessee and their visit to the Great Smoky Mountains. That's the first time in my life I ever remember hearing about the Smokies. As Bo told the story, my mind filled with wonder as I imagined the mountains covered in blue smoke and my heart longed to go there. I remember thinking that day something to the effect, "You can actually go there?".
My mind was made up as soon as I was grown up I was going to visit those mountains. Well, I've been grown up for many years now and I have kept that promise to myself and my children. We have visited those mountains, countless times over the years and those hills became a second home for our family. Summertime, Fall of the year and even at Christmas, we have spent our family vacation in those sacred mountains.
As Summer approaches now, my heart turns toward Tennessee and we are planning a family vacation in about a month and this time we're taking the whole McAllister crew.
Twenty members of our immediate family are gearing up for the trip.
It's incredible, what storytelling and the sense of wonder in the eyes of a child can do to shape the life of a man and his family.