Read Excerpts from The Chaffin Journal

Poetry

            Maybe he was just lucky.  Maybe it was just the time or the place.  Maybe it was when he was where he was.  Whatever it was, in the fall of 1962, there was a lot going on in the life of young Alex Allen.

            Maybe it was the fact that his family lived in a place filled with families just like his—mom and dad and the kids in a small bungalow on a tree-lined street.  The noise in the neighborhood before supper, wiffleball and football in the backyard, bikes up and down the street, little league, people on their porches on hot summer nights listening to Jimmy Dudley and the Indians.

            Porchlamps for trick-or-treat, the high school lights ablaze just down the hill for football games on Friday nights, holding hands on the way to July 4^th fireworks with Debbie Chessman from the beige house with the new aluminum siding three blocks down the street, her powder-sweet scent mingling with the warmth that simmered up from the sidewalk in the early evening.  Watching Steve Allen with his sister Mary on Friday nights when she didn’t have a date, ice cream, popcorn, and Kool Aid so thick with sugar it almost stirred like oil.