A week after my 11th birthday, we are back in Indiana for Thanksgiving.
Grandma Davis, Aunt Nora, and Dad got up at dawn to fuss about in the kitchen, stuffing the turkey, making a scalloped corn casserole, putting little fork prints into pie crusts. The rest of us watch tv or wander around outside with the dogs, as the house gradually fills up with aunts and uncles, great-aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, their boyfriends and girlfriends, miscellaneous friends invited at random.
I have door-answering duty when my Aunt Edna and Uncle John arrive with their grown-up son Phil.
Dad doesn't get along with his older sister, so we don't see them very often, even though they live only an hour's drive from Rome City. I haven't seen Cousin Phil since I was a little kid. Now he's grown up, in college: medium height, clean-shaven, light brown hair cut short, kind of cute but not "dreamy."
But waiting at the front door next to him is the most beautiful man I have ever seen!
Afro-American, and not just brown-skinned, but actually black., very, very dark, flawless. A head taller than Cousin Phil, with a round smiling face and a huge v-shaped torso that pushes out his blue business suit and white overcoat. Huge hands.As Aunt Edna and Uncle John head toward the kitchen, I stare, thunderstruck. Cousin Phil looks nervous.
"Um...Boomer, this is my friend Malcolm from school."
"Hi, Boomer," Malcolm says in a beautifully accented English. "What subject do you study in college?"
"What...no, I'm not in college, I'm in sixth grade!"
He laughs. "My mistake -- you seem so mature." We shake hands. My small hand is engulfed in his.
The full story, with nude photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.