Paul Smith's Garage

I was still a toddler. What is a "toddler" anyway? A baby that is on the go? A baby whose legs have been activated? I was very much on the go. Fact. I think that my aunt Judith, still a young girl, tried to run after me. I know that I worried the shit out of my grandparents', Paul and Anna Mae Smith, as I ran from car to car in the field behind Paul Smith's garage, which, in its day, was a marvel in the automotive repair business on the topigraphicaly busy eastern edge of the mighty Cumberland Plateau on the Morgan County Highway just southeast of Wartburg, Tennessee. Metal carnage awiated me in the field. From one to the other I entererd the wrecked cars, where possible, and grabbed the huge steering wheels and pretended. My infant pretense was binary, without reflection of any kind. The essence of ignorance, forgiven by infancy. In hindsight, I now reflect at the circumstantial evidence of tragedy. So many deaths occurred, broken bones, bloodletting. But at the time, I was joyful in my ignorance. These vehicles in this graveyard were from the 1930's, 40's, and fifties. The latest models yard were early sixties; the year that I was there was 1964. I would be adopted away before I knew what happened to this entire facet of my infancy. Paul Smith would drown and die in a propspective addition to a junk yard, somewhere in Roane County. I was the happiest I would ever be. My grandfather was a tragic figure. Bent down regularly with bipolar depression and the associated effects of self-medication with copious amounts of alcohol, which he purchased from my maternal grandfather, usually on Sundays.

My first memory was of a time with my grandfather, Paul Clifford Smith. We wrecked in Roane County en route to Warburg from Missionary Ridge, in Chattanooga. He had stopped somewhere on Highway 27 and bought me a Coca Cola in a little green bottle. When we wrecked, his head fell into my diapered lap. I instructed his unconscious face that I no longer wanted my Coke. "Papaw, I don wone my coke no more." In writing this, I cannot imagine why I would have said this because I always empty the recepticle, especially when it contains sugar and carmel flavoring. We were taken to the Roane County Jail where the Smith family was summoned to collect me. My maiden recollection. I can still see it. His sad face.