About

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While reading, I have been – 

       -- A cowboy (and an Indian) with Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour                          

       -- A Confederate soldier with Joseph Pennell and Philip Lee Williams    

       -- A pirate with Robert Louis Stevenson 

       -- An orphan with Charles Dickens 

       -- An eccentric with Flannery O'Connor 

       -- A dust-bowl traveler with John Steinbeck

While reading, I have been – 

       -- A whaler with Herman Melville 

       -- A gold-dreamer with Erskine Caldwell 

       -- A small-town barber with Wendell Berry 

       -- A runaway with Mark Twain 

       -- An old-time gospel god with James Weldon Johnson

While reading, I have been – 

       -- A b-flat coronet player with William Price Fox 

       -- A battler of windmills with Miguel de Cervantes 

       -- An attendant in the House of Gentle Men with Kathy Hepinstall

       -- A basketball player with Pat Conroy, a fire-fighter with Larry Brown,  a defense

          attorney with John Grisham. 

While reading, I have touched the ocean's darkest depths and walked on planets in solar systems beyond our seeing.

While reading, I have climbed mountains lost in clouds, and walked the different road with Robert Frost and gazed at the little cat feet of fog with Carl Sandburg and danced to the language-music of Byron Herbert Reece and Edgar Allen Poe and David Bottoms.

While reading, I have flown the Atlantic with Charles Lindbergh and pierced the caul of space with John Glenn.

While reading, I have stood at Gettysburg with Lincoln and in Montgomery with Martin Luther King, Jr.

While reading, I have rejoiced with the still-living of Dachau on the day of liberation, and I have seen the unspeakable sorrow of  Hiroshima on the day of killing.

While reading, I have sat at the feet of Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and Buddha, and all the other men of God, and also those who would kill God -- the insane, the madmen, the bigoted, the fanatics.

While reading, I have been boy and man, girl and woman. I have been young and old. I have died and have been re-born.

While reading, I have become people I cannot be, doing things I cannot do. And I do not know of another experience that could have given me such a life.  

Terry Kay

Copyright, 2006

Revised for a reading at the LaGrange Public Library on April 14, 2016​​
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