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last point one hundred
percent,” my father said.
    “Big surprise,” Jane said, too quietly for
Daddy to hear her.
    “Everybody look that way and smile.” Scotty
pointed at the fountain.
    As we complied with his request, Scotty and
Ben Gainey raced to the other side of the fountain and took the
last few more pictures.
    “So, what are y’all sitting around for?”
Scotty finally asked. “Get on over to the Steak House-everybody’s
waiting on you.”
    “Ever thought about comedy as a line of
work, Scotty?” Eddie asked.
    “No. Have you?” Scotty replied,
grinning.

 
    CHAPTER
TWO

    My family and I, and the few remaining
stragglers from the courthouse dedication, made our way down First
Avenue toward the Tallagumsa Steak House. When the light turned
red, I grabbed Jessie’s hand and tensed for the dangerous
confrontation that crossing streets in downtown Atlanta had become.
I looked both ways. Two cars were making the turn; both stopped.
The woman in the first car smiled and motioned us to walk ahead. I
relaxed and released Jessie’s hand.
    How nice it would be not to have to worry at
every downtown intersection about life and death. One day in
Atlanta, on the way to Jessie’s day care, I had to jump about two
feet backward, jerking Jes along with me to avoid being crushed by
the speeding car that turned right into us. I couldn’t imagine that
my children would ever be old enough to cross Atlanta’s busiest
intersections alone.
    Of course, in defense of my fellow
Atlantans, I understood that these Tallagurnsa drivers were so much
more courteous and less likely to try to kill a person, at least in
part, because they had less cause to be rude: There was no such
thing as a traffic jam here, and the concept of a rush hour was
ridiculous.
    When I left Tallagumsa for college in 1969,
I’d hated its molasses-slow pace of life. Back then I dreamed of
men and women in designer clothes rushing from one momentous
meeting to another, hailing cabs, passing through the revolving
doors of towering buildings, and waiting in front of elevator banks
that would take them to the sixty-fifth or seventy-second floor,
where they would conduct business of earth-shaking importance. I
fantasized about packed expressways and busy downtown streets. I
desperately wanted a city full of strangers who didn’t know
everything about me and my family, who’d pass me on the
street and not recognize me, a place to get lost when you wanted or
needed to be left alone. I wanted challenge, action, excitement,
and anonymity.
    What I once found romantic about city life,
however, I now found inconvenient, unsafe, tiring, or simply
irritating. A recent string of unsolved burglaries in our Atlanta
neighborhood worried me whenever we left our apartment, and a walk
through downtown Atlanta left me longing for clean air, peace and
quiet, and open spaces.
    We walked two and three abreast the two
blocks to the Tallagumsa Steak House. Mother and Jane were in the
lead; Buck and Ben Gainey were close behind them. Jessie, feeling a
bit frenzied from the courthouse-dedication ceremony, the waiting
and the posing for pictures, ran up and down the sidewalk, circling
us and the parking meters in a series of giant figure eights. She
sang over and over the only lines she knew from the “Sesame Street”
theme song: “Sunny day chasing the clouds away. Can you tell me how
to get to Sesame Street?”
    Smoking a Salem, Eddie followed a few feet
behind my father and me. At least he wasn’t muttering to himself
or, worse, shouting in anger like the Glad Bag Man near our Atlanta
apartment.
    The Glad Bag Man was an elderly homeless man
who kept his belongings in a green plastic garbage bag that he
somehow balanced upon his head. He passed the day screaming at all
who passed his park bench. His verbal barrage of curse words and
stream-of-consciousness conspiratorial plot lines tying together
hell, President Carter, UFOs, and Patty Hearst had given Jessie
more than one