The summer I was ten, I was riding with my grandpa, Amon William Dedge, in his brand-new F-100 Ford pickup truck along County Road 6, headed from Uncle Guy’s Shell gas station west towards the town of Jasper, Florida. At that time Old Red – as the pickup came to be known – was not old, but still Ford eggshell white, not the dull red it would be for many years after, red being the cheapest color you could buy to paint a truck back then. Its wide expanse of hood the day of our drive reflected the unforgiving Southern sun into our eyes as it descended, in infinitesimal increments, toward the distant, cool dream of evening. On either side of the flat, straight, jet-black brush stroke of the newly paved highway, fields of corn, soybeans, and tobacco baked their way ever so languidly up into the steaming July air. The deafening screams of cicadas filled the cab of the truck with their incredible hissing, a high-pitched screeching so ubiquitous that it became a silence more profound than that found in any graveyard. Grandpa didn’t much care for small talk, and, little chatterbox that I was, I had learned that if I wanted to stay on his good side, I would curb my wandering tongue or get left behind on trips like this one. I liked having Grandpa to myself; as one of four brothers it was all too easy to get lost in the crowd. That day was the first time I noticed that I had the same knobby bumps on my wrists that he did. My brothers didn’t have them. I had no idea then that those protruding bones were the early telegraphs of a debilitating arthritis; I thought it was cool that my hands looked the same as his. They made me feel connected, whole, complete.
