The sunshine is noticeable in Waycross, Georgia. I've come down to help bury my uncle, but have stayed to help Dad do some yardwork for a few days. You just can't venture out for long into this sun. It's 95 degrees with 95 percent humidity, when it isn't raining down fat drops from a thunderstorm. This creates a steam room effect. There are lots of critters around, but during the middle of the day it is pretty quiet. Not even the dog stirred off the porch when we went over to my cousin's place to eat lunch. John is 94 and my mother's double first cousin. If you aren't familiar with double cousins, that's when two members of a family marry two members of another family. In this case it was three sisters marrying three brothers. That can generate a bunch of double first cousins. Any way John has converted the old icehouse in Blackshear into an antique store and he has a lunch time buffet with a variety of entrees including BBQ pork. Southern cooked vegetables. I had green beans, rice and stewed tomatos, all the pork I could pile on my platter sized plate, the sweetest rolls I've had in awhile, a piece of poundcake, topped off with icecream. All that for $4.99. And everything was wonderful to the taste. Carter would have liked this meal. Too bad he is working in Alpharetta instead of here with us. There was fried okra, other beans, corn, potatoes, greens, chicken, baked and fried, lots of different desserts, and other stuff I can't remember. I'm stuffed.

Billy said there were 240 at the funeral home on Monday night. There were others at the funeral, but I didn't see some of those reported to be there whom I had hoped to see. I did see Wade and Aunt Sybil though and I haven't seen them in a long time and many, many other cousins. Almost 40 years since I've seen Wade I guess.

My daughter gave me a signed copy of Rocket Boys, the boyhood adventure of Homer Hickam as a rocket scientist (the movie was October Sky). Since I identify so strongly with their science fair experience and the difficulty of communicating with my father, I think that many of the elements in the story are my story. Many of my contemporaries at Terry Parker High School were winning International Science Fair trophies. Had I stayed there, I'm pretty sure they had hopes for me to make my way there too. I did win a national award for my 8th grade project. That got my teachers' attention. But we moved and the new school didn't require science projects. And that was that.

The music is enough for me though.