This is always been one of my favorite photos, and I brought it back home after my recent Austin trip:
I’m on the right, holding the football and not looking at the camera. To my right (left on the photo) is my best friend at the time, Davie Baird. He was also the youngest child in a large family, and lived down the street. Although he was a year ahead of me in school, we were pretty inseparable from the time I was in Kindergarten through about second grade.
This picture is pretty typical … I always liked sports more than Davie, so it makes sense that I’m wearing a numbered jersey and holding the ball while he is in a plaid shirt and fully complying with the photographer.
My one brush with the law came with Davie, as we broke some windows in what we called “The Old Y’ — an abandoned former YMCA building in our neighborhood. It was abandoned, so why did it matter if we threw rocks through the windows? The police did not agree, and I spent the rest of that particular summer cleaning baseboards to earn money to replace what we had destroyed.
This photo, of course, is on a much happier day, pretending to be Dallas Cowboys while leaves fall.