My Life Between the Dimensions

Meacham Lane Memoirs/Eddie’s Lunch Moon Pies, RC Colas, Pin Ball Machines and Ten Cent Chili Dogs As I advanced into my pre-teen and early teen years, I succumbed to the lure of our hang-out at Eddie’s Lunch.  It was every bit as important to my leisure time as Bob’s Dairy Queen was to my junior and senior high school years, or Bob’s and Noble Park Dairy Queen in my Junior College years. The diner was owned and operated by Eddie Box, his mother and grandmother.  The white boarded building was located across from the site of the original Farley Elementary School on Old Benton Road next to Keel’s Grocery store. Usually Sonny and Gary Vaughn and myself made the mile walk each way, quarters jingling in faded blue jean pockets. Sometimes we would be accompanied by Donnie Wyatt, Randy Paris, or some other neighborhood friend....and met others once we got there. Keel’s Grocery was an important outlet for my mother and dad when we relocated from Lone Oak to our Meacham L...

Marmont Hill Art Collective "Nash's Pond" by Curtis.  The Meacham Lane gang could not have looked much different heading to Ramsey's Pond minus the picnic basket and plus another ball cap or two. Nothing honed my pre-adolescent fishing acumen more than my trips to Ramsey's Pond.  My love of the old farm stock pond lasted through most of the years we lived at the little house on Meacham Lane and for another year or two when we relocated to the little grey rental house on Estes Lane. But, sometime around 1957 and eleven years of age the little gravel lane could no longer contain either me or my best friend, Sonny Vaughn, and our need to explore and that sense of adventure led us further and further away from the rows of houses and the tiny yards.  I am not sure who was the first of the juvenile Sir Edmund Hillary "wantabes" that discovered the pond, located just over the railroad tracks on Husbands Road about three miles from the road's ...

Nam, March 1969 Her name was Nam (Nom).  She told me once that that it meant nine or ninth, and referred to her order of birth to her parents in the little village of Di An in the Bien Hoa district of South Vietnam. Her home was in the tiny cluster of huts just east of our Di An ( pronounced as Zee-on) forward base camp and west of the Song Dong Nai River. I never knew her age, but always figured her to be in her early to mid-thirties. Nam was already there when I was assigned my hooch and mosquito netted bunk in late spring/early summer of 1968.  She was what was referred to as a “hooch momma-san”.  Her main chores were to keep the floors, always dusty in the dry season and always filthy with mud in the monsoon season, as pristine as possible.  General housekeeping was also part of her expected chores and, depending on whether you were courteous and considerate to her, she might keep your personal space tidy and neat. She picked up a few extra dollars a...

March 19, 2015 Yucky day for sunbathing.  It  was about 34 degrees last night with cold misty rain.  Today is not much better.  The high turned out to be a cold, wet, 50 degrees but much colder in the morning with clouds and showers. I got my combination license from Fast Eddie’s, and after tying up a couple of 1/64th oz yellow jigs, rigged one ultralight rod up with a float and size 10 mustad bait hook, and another with a float and one of the jigs. I then climbed into my 2000 F-150 and headed down the road to Mike Miller Park. I began fishing the jig tipped with corn yellow trout dough next to the fountain cascading water 10 feet into the air.  After several missed strikes using a pause and slow retrieve, the last a flash of some merit from a decent fish, I rigged up the ultralight float and bait rig with a red worm and cast it into the vicinity allowing the weightless red worm to slowly sink its way about three feet below the bobber into the strike zone....

December 25, 2001 134 Clearview Drive, Columbia, South Carolina For my Sons There are very few Christmas’ that I remember during my formative years with Mother and Dad and my brother Ken in Paducah, Kentucky in the 1950's.   We lived in a very small house at 1507 Meacham Lane. There was a large elm tree in the front yard by the straight gravel road that, in ensuing years, would yield to asphalt.  There was a large limb growing horizontally out of the old tree, and there is no telling how many hours I spent upside down, hanging like a skinny possum in the sun.  When we first moved into the house, the wood outhouse still stood, along with a chicken house,  with a fenced in area.  The chicken house metamorphosed over the years as a shed for storage and even served as a stable for a short time for my horse, Domino. Christmas mostly was not something of which I have fond or enduring memories, which is to say it rates considerably better...

Why Did You Not Love Us?                                         We were the generation of unloved warriors.   It is still hard to understand why.   But, don’t ever think y ou made us ashamed.    We know we fought, bled, and died with honor...if not with acclaim.  As you distanced yourselves from us on our arrivals home, so, too, did we distance you. As we assess the reasons and reality of so many homeless Vietnam vets in our cities and the rate of  suicides, I hope in the future we give value to the affirmation and need for validation our men and women require coming home from service in our foreign wars. Winning the Vietn am War was considered so vital to our interests  that a draft was imposed.   Serious students ha...

Baseball Nothing else occupied our thoughts, bodies, and play time as much as baseball in our early years.  Ken and I lived to play it, to listen to it on the radio and when we finally got the little T.V. with the round screen, to watch the black and white game of the week. But probably nothing captured our imaginations more than sitting in the evenings outside the door of our tiny kitchen on the concrete slab covering our cistern water supply and listening to the voice of the St. Louis Cardinals, Harry Caray on the radio calling the game.  “Holy cow” and “it might be, it could be, IT IS a home run” gave us a tingle right down to the toes protruding from our well worn socks.  His vivid and colorful call of the games gave us thrills beyond description.  Stan the Man Musial and Red Schoendienst were my early favorites, and in ensuing years Wally Moon, Ken Boyer, Little Don Blasingame, Wilmer Vinegar Bend Mizell, and Harvey Haddix.  I can still hear Harry, the ...

THE HUNTER I have been aware that it is out there since my early twenties, when as a young soldier it made itself known to me.  It has been on the periphery of consciousness on more than one occasion as the seasons have passed in my life from early spring to frigid clarity of winter.  It visits often now, making itself ready for the harvest, coming in the stillness, in the darkness, between what is dream and what is reality.   At times, knowing of its lurking, being acutely aware of its mission and the inevitable success of its stalking, I am both fearful of the conclusion....and not.  I am becoming accustomed to its visits and, eyes open in that stillness and darkness, contemplate both the wounds it has already delivered and those yet to be delivered. Keith 01/13/15

                  L-R: My brother Ken Ragan, father Bob Ragan, and me with my book. Meacham Lane, McCracken County, KY. Sometime between 1955-1956 I requested my first book that wasn’t affiliated with Disney, Marvel or Action comics with the sole intent of seeking information and not entertainment. Comic books had been a huge part of my entertainment in my early years.  I loved all the Disney comics and characters, all the action heroes, and even the Archie and Jugheads.  Mother seemed to encourage my passion and my collection was sizable and no doubt contributed to my early mastery of reading.  I wasn’t the only kid on Meacham Lane with a collection and "swaps"  were often and negotiations were intense but amicable. But somewhere along the way I had a spontaneous love affair with the plastic recreations of the Mesozoic and Jurassic at the "dime store", more correctly the Kresge’s 5&10 on Broadwa...