Bob Cowser, Jr.

Excerpt from "Scorekeeping"
(Bob's Contribution to the Anthology)

"We live two lives: one restless in our bodies and one beyond that, which saves us. That’s a fortune cookie platitude I came to all by myself the summer I finished eighth grade and turned fourteen, the summer my brother’s grade school friend took a revolver from his father’s rifle cabinet and shot himself in the head. I knew it was a plain thought even as I composed it, laying on my back in my bed the nights after the kid killed himself. I had made it deliberately plain, piecing it together word by word. I did not want the echo of scripture to complicate what I thought was the barest truth of things.
This was 1984. My brother Jimmy and I lived with our family in the rural West Tennessee town of Martin, two hours up the Mississippi from Memphis, along the same stretch of the river Huckleberry Finn and another Jim are said to have traveled. Martin was a railroad town established in 1873 on land originally ceded from the Chickasaw and named for a Mr. William Martin, who donated considerable acreage in order that the Illinois Central Gulf tracks might be routed through the area’s creek bottoms. A boy’s life there was mostly slow but also oddly brutal, something our parents had not known to prepare my brother and me for, having transplanted themselves and their family to rural Tennessee from other places. But the hollow report of that revolver had jarred all of us into a new awareness. I struggled to get my mind around the notion of two lives at first, though it had been my own idea originally. I couldn’t imagine in any detail a life beyond my bodily one, beyond the grief I found when I came to that body’s limits. Maybe we don’t find that place beyond our bodies until we are in dire need, which is the one time we can trust ourselves to learn anything, need being such a fine teacher."