Slices of Life

By Ken Staley

What memories do you cherish from your youth? How would they play out of your memory now?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Staley
• Release date: Apr 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781503258372

Book preview

Uncle Ed’s stories instantly transform you back into a simpler time in America, in the same way as Norman Rockwell paintings. The descriptions are accurate but not overdone, the dialogue is period and real, the stories engaging.

LeRoy Clary—The Dragon Clan Series, Dragon, The Mage’s Daughter, The Blade of Lies, Here Be Dragons

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Missing. - What an utterly charming slice of beautiful, warm life you have created for us readers. I feel like I have been sitting on the porch at Uncle Ed's with the dear Aunties...thanks so much for sharing this endearing tale.

Jean Goldstrom, Publisher, Whortleberry Press

~ Contents ~

Foreword:

~Prologue~

~ Out of the Blue ~

~ Stage Fright ~

~ The Switching Tree ~

~ Nancy Sue ~

~ Missing ~

~ Lunch Break ~

~ Fight or Flight ~

~ Adeste fideles ~

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

~ In Time, Passes ~

~ There’s a maple in the meadow ~

~Hurrah Hill~

Foreword:

Please keep in mind that these are works of fiction and, other than the physical store, have no basis in reality at all. They are a product of my imagination. I hope you’ll find as much joy reading them as I did in their creation. I did drop the last d from Edd's name. No particular reason except it is less confusing. Blame literary license. I didn't want my readers stumbling over Edd every time they saw his name.

I have not changed Uncle Edd's store. It is exactly as described by one of Edd Kendall’s young relatives. I've changed the number of the high-way. If you're at all curious, a trip through northern Tennessee into any of the sleepy towns there will be well worth your trip. You’re sure to find the place, or something very similar.

I will not tell you the exact location of the store that Edd Kendall ran for so long. It remains much as it's always been, I suspect. With one major exception: Edd Kendall is no longer there.

It's in Tennessee, a stone's throw from the Kentucky border, East of Nashville. Rolling hills surround the store along with some of the best farmland in the world. As I've been told, Kendall Grocery was a sort of social gathering place for the area. Certainly everyone in the area was familiar with Edd and his store. When he died, a great portion of that state and southern Kentucky shut down for his funeral.

When I started these stories, it dawned on me that I'd better secure permission from the family before I got too deep into them. Not only did the family give me their blessing, but it seems everyone in the family wanted to be a character in the stories. It is my goal to eventually write enough to include as many of them as I can. It is my joy to keep the memory of Edd Kendall alive long after his store has shut its doors for the last time.

With my most heart-felt gratitude, this book is dedicated to the memory of Edd Kendall and those family members he leaves behind.

~Prologue~

Flowers crowded the floor and shelf space in Uncle Ed's Store. Funeral mourners and well-wishers filtered out with a last look as the sun faded behind the hills. October cast its Indian summer glow through the dusty windows and late autumn flies chased dust mites through shafts of sunlight.

Dakota closed and locked the door. He paused as he reached out to, flip the sign to CLOSED. Somehow the symbolism hit us at the same time.

Uncle Ed’s store was the nerve center of our small community – its heart and soul. Life passed through Uncle Ed’s store. Events near and far came across the threshold and broadened our horizons whether we knew it at the time or not. Present day found our families scattered across the map, but here, in Uncle Ed’s, we were home. Our melancholy was for Uncle Ed, but more, for the end of a large chapter in our lives.

I walked over to ‘our spot' at the very end of the counter. Part check-out counter, part soda fountain, it ran the width of the store. Red Naugahyde still covered the four stools, which spun as freely as they had when new. As a six year old, giving each a healthy spin each was one of the joys in life. We’d spent hours sitting in our spot - doing homework, reading comics, listening as life’s lessons came and went through the store. Without a word, Dakota fetched two Dr. Peppers from the cooler, filled them both with peanuts, and handed one to me. I smiled...it had been ages...and we clinked bottles and drank.

Lost in our own thoughts, we sat silently for a bit. I found myself looking around the store. Almost at every glance, another tale – memories of yet another story fought their way to the surface. Eventually one of those memories was simply too rich not to share again in as much detail as we could.

Say, do you remember....

And so began a long night of memories.

~ Out of the Blue ~

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The school bus dropped us off at Uncle Ed’s store two weeks before Halloween. Uncle Ed’s is sort of the social gathering spot in the Hollow and was the best place for a bus stop. Just fifty feet up the lane from a bad curve in old Highway Forty-one outside of Red Boiling Springs, the squat, peeling, white-washed clap board building has a tin roof streaked with rust. At the left of the forever-dusty screen door hangs a Pepsi Cola sign, in the shape of a bottle cap, antiquated and of indeterminate colors - with a thermometer in the center that no longer works. On the other side hangs a chipped and sun bleached Coca-Cola sign that proudly announces KENDALL GROCERY. To my brother and me, though, it has always been Uncle Ed’s Store.

The first thing you saw in Uncle Ed’s Store was a semi-circle of old chairs facing a wood burning stove. Each chair had its own ‘owner’. Strangers were made to feel uncomfortable if they sat in one of the empty chair. A blue haze clouded Ed’s Store every day as the men smoked constantly. Some rolled their own cigarettes, others used ‘store boughts’, but they all smoked. On rare occasions, one or two chewed tobacco. Now and then, Scooter Davis would slip me one of his store boughts when he thought no one was looking.

I wasn’t old enough to join The Circle yet, but I could rest my feet on the bars under the counter as I nursed my peanut filled Dr. Pepper and pretended to do homework, keeping the newest comic book hidden among the papers in my three ring binder.

Buster Jenkins, easily the oldest, always chewed a cigar. He started with a new one every morning and his lips moved the white plastic tip from one side of his mouth to the other, depending on who was talking. On a summer day, his John Deere hat came off so he could mop his brow - there wasn’t much hair, just a mass of liver spots. He claimed to be sixty, others said he was seventy, Uncle Ed swore he was 80 or more. He sat closest to the old stove at one end of the horseshoe. He needed to be close to the warm stove ‘cuz of the lumbago’ he claimed.

More likely it’s the lead behind your back pockets, Uncle Ed replied every time Buster made his excuse. You only sit there so you can set your coffee cup or beer on the stove.

Big Al Davis sat next to Buster. An ox of a man, Big Al never said a word but followed every conversation with an intense stare, regardless