Finished: To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee). Wow, I loved this book! One of my favorites so far in this endeavor. The writing, the characters, the messages, the imagery. I love Atticus Finch...what a father! I didn't grow up in the south, because Texas wasn't really considered the south. It was just Texas. But...my father was from a very small town in northern Louisiana...almost to Arkansas. By the time we would visit there as kids, it still only had 5000 people. We were the city cousins from the suburbs coming to visit our small-town cousins. Oh how I wanted to grow up in that small town like they did. I loved it there.

 I can definitely feel the atmosphere of my dad's hometown when I read books about the south like To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm not sure I can put it into words...so many things hit close to home. Walking barefoot everywhere, the school building being the center of town (all grades, 1 thru 12), the church bells, the fishing poles, the climbing trees, "main street", rolling through stop signs riding on the tailgate of my grandpa's truck because you didn't really need to stop if there wasn't another car there, and yes, the "colored" part of town, most definitely separated from the rest. Only, they didn't used the word "colored" which may or may not have been the politically correct way to say it in those days. Folks there used the "n" word as easy as if they were saying their own names. That's just how it was. And probably why, I figured out years later, we weren't raised there. That wasn't a word allowed in our vocabulary.

I remember my dad, much like Atticus Finch, quietly, and with non-judgement, helping me learn a lesson in that town once. I was in 8th or 9th grade. It was our last night visiting before driving back home the next day. You know how families used to drive on their vacations everywhere? Being the adventurous souls we were, my cousins and I (female my age, male one year older and a friend of theirs one year older) decided we'd drive across the parish line into a non-dry parish and go to somebody's cabin and drink alcohol. We enlisted the older brother of the cousins, who reluctantly bought us some screw-cap bottle wine and sent us on our way. It was the first time I ever got drunk. I'm not sure how we got home, but I do remember my head hanging out a window.

When we got home, we went into my granny's house, and I was sick. Of course, my mother thought I was sick, sick. My daddy knew better. He took me into the downstairs bathroom and sat in there with me on the edge of the ceramic tub while I knelt on the floor and threw up in the toilet every few minutes. He'd just sit there and hold my hair back when it was needed, not saying anything. Finally, when it was all done he just said, "Whelp, that's one lesson you've gotta learn on your own...nobody can teach you that." No judgement, just a lesson learned in his books.

One of my favorite Atticus quotes, "...before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

I guess reading about the quiet, strength of Atticus Finch, doing the best he knew to raise his children right...with the right morals and thoughts of their own, reminded me of my dad. Loved this book! :-) Never have liked wine since then.