Robert Joseph Chastain

Growin' Up Small-Town: tales from a long-lost time and place Robert Joseph Chastain

In that dark war winter of 1943 there was born into a little village of 4,000 souls a boy child, the four-thousand-and-first soul in that unknown little town. Growin' up small-town, I knew all of the four thousand souls, and I was known and watched over, the eldest of the tribe of cousins, the youngest of my long line in that beautiful red dirt. Memories: the stories we tell ourselves and others to say who we are and where we've come from. And then one day I realized the stories I've been telling about yesterday and yesteryear have become ancient. And so many of the people who live in those tales are no longer here.