World Beginnings

  Gradually, I have been cleaning and tossing old memories because they mean nothing to anyone but me. The picture above is my first husband, our son Steven and his two children Erik and Hope. Thomas Leroy Witcher was born in Choctaw County, Mississippi, in 1945 to the poorest of poor families. His father, Booker, was elderly when he married Bessie, an illiterate fourteen-year-old girl. Together they had seven children. Old Booker had given up the drink and became a fervent religious convert in his dotage. The family had so little to eat, his mother canned peas and beans, and there was certain to be at least one fly in each jar. The family joke was that was all the meat they had to eat.  Thomas and his sister Maybelle were the only ones to make a life for themselves. Maybelline attended Belhaven College, married a fellow student, and they became missionaries. Thomas attended the local junior college for a semester and dropped out to join the army. One summer day in 1966, a friend and I

  Sri Lanka, 2005 One of my classes in Sri Lanka was analyzing E. M. Forrester's masterpiece  Passage to India , one of the most important works of the 20th century. In an attempt to convey the mysticism of India to these young people, I learned about a very unusual Hindu temple in Colombo. In short order, I arranged a field trip. The picture above represents the type of structure we would see around Colombo. But the temple we visited was unlike any Hindu temple in Sri Lanka. After talking about proper behavior in a holy place, we traveled to this temple. I wish I could remember the name. Arriving, I was struck by the concrete structure before us, nothing like I expected. Fortunately, there were only about twelve students, and they huddled around me as we entered the dark interior, leaving our shoes at the door. Unexpectedly, we had come on a particular holy day. Hundreds of candles lit the interior, creating an otherworldly sense. Devotees had brought offerings of flowers whose s