Bone McGraw

1 – The Beginning

By Chris McGraw

Little Bobby McGraw sat on the front porch of his grandparents little two bedroom and one bath home. Shack was more like it. It wasn’t like Bobby resented it, it was just the family was so dirt poor, it was amazing they owned what they had. It wasn’t from a lack of hard work for sure. They were a bunch of hard working, honest people, and country born and bred. They were the kind of people the world could use a whole lot more of.

Little Bobby sat there on the front porch thinking. School had let out for the summer and he was wondering about a few things. The small little southern town he lived in never put much on material possessions, but he couldn’t help to notice after a few years, most of the other kids started school with new clothes, new shoes, new book bags and the like. Bobby was raised to take care of what little he was blessed with. The only way he ever received brand new was once his mom couldn’t patch whatever it was that needed fixing up, which equaled out to be about every two or three years.

There was this longing inside of him that just wanted more, that he could do better than this. He was only twelve years old, going into the seventh grade when school started back up and he was beginning to think about his future. If his outcome was to be left up to someone, his future left in someone’s hands, it may as well be in his hands. If he controlled his own destiny, no one could be blamed for holding him back. At this point, he had to depend on others. That wasn’t something he liked to do. If he depended on himself, the sky was the limit. Honesty and hard work was distilled in him to get him as far as he wanted to go. Right now, he wasn’t sure where that place was, but it only took a moment for him to realize that it wasn’t where he was. Where he was, was only the starting point to where he wanted to go. There was a family history of people working their backsides off and just getting by. He was determined to make his hard work count and to get him somewhere. Where that somewhere was wasn’t clear yet, but it definitely wasn’t here. Then, out of nowhere, he gets this urge to run. No particular direction, just to run. It was as if someone spoke some good news to his soul and all he could do was to run for joy, for if he kept the joy bottled up inside of him, he felt as if he would just explode.

His grandmother came out onto the front porch to tell him to come in for lunch as he was taking off down the road with his burst of energy. She thought to herself, ‘That child’s going to be in the papers one day: I just hope it’s not in the obituaries.’