It is Better to Receive

The best gifts are usually things we can actually use. Tangible or intangible, the best gifts help us to experience life in new and different ways.

The best gift I ever received was way back in 1984.

It was a SONY CFS-W350 Boombox Cassette Player and Radio. A Ghetto Blaster. It was my birthday, and I was 12 years old. “Gimme All Your Lovin’” by ZZ Top was without question my favorite song that year.

My goodness, I ghetto-blasted the heck out of that song.

If I’m being honest, Glen Campbell was my favorite singer for the first decade and a half of my life, but he doesn’t carry quite the same punch as do the bristly, bearded brothers that my mother loathed so much. It is much cooler to claim them and not the Rhinestone Cowboy as my rock heroes of the mid-eighties.

I found out way too late that ZZ Top weren’t actually twins. They weren’t even brothers! And, somehow, that makes them even cooler to me now.

That boombox, that gift, changed everything for me.

It began an affinity for music that I cannot fully explain. I’ve never learned to play an instrument, and I can hardly carry a tune unless I’m in the shower or alone in a car, but music has always been an important part of my life.

Thanks to that gift.

Stories do the same thing to me. They are gifts that have the potential to change things.

Everything.

I don’t remember the first story I was ever told, but along the way a lot of stories have changed the way I think, feel, believe, live, and create. Bible stories. Children’s stories — The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and Charlotte’s Web. I remember The Red Pony. The Outsiders. Lord of the Flies. And To Kill A Mockingbird.

That story — To Kill A Mockingbird — changed my life the same year Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man, and Legs were booming through that magic birthday box. Harper Lee made me want to be a writer. Then, a few years later, I found Kurt Vonnegut and decided to become one.

There’s something remarkable about how words can connect with other words and then to our hearts as if we are able to see for the very first time. To hear. It’s wondrous. It’s wonderful.

I just wrote my second book. Another true story. Another wonderfully powerful true story.

And it is a gift.

This story has changed everything for me. Again. Now, I see. Now, I hear.

This story is about my friend, Alton Hardy, and his journey from the dirt roads of Selma, Alabama through Louisville, Kentucky and Grand Rapids Michigan — back home, to Birmingham. It’s a story about fatherlessness and poverty and racism and anger and loneliness and hope for better days.

My greatest hope is that you will be able to use this story, and that you, too, will experience life in new and different ways because of it.