A Winter Of Angels

Chapter Nine

A few weeks ago, I found myself back in that little town of Mayhew. I had gotten a call saying a certain friend of mine had passed away.

When I heard the name I froze where I was standing. The friend's name was Burt Mackenzie. It seemed as if I had forgotten all about my childhood. As if none of it had ever happened.

It wasn't until I was entering the outskirts of Mayhew that it all hit me at once. I remembered my childhood. I remembered my friends. My past. I remembered Jeph Baylor.

I had went to Burt's funeral and there I saw her. I saw Val Scott. She had looked just as lovely as she did in my memory. She recognized me the same as I had for her and we immediately ran over to each other and hugged.

I couldn't believe that ever since I moved away from Mayhew after high school....the big school....and had went to college in a big city over in Texas, I had missed out on so much of my friends' lives. Val and Burt had remained in Mayhew and had been teaching at the middle school. Val was a science teacher. And Burt was a reading teacher.

That day, me and Val had talked so much about our childhood and she brought up Jeph Baylor. We talked for hours on end. It was as if we continued right where we had stopped.

When I came back to my house, I decided to write this memoir of my life because it was all too magical to just go unheard.

Mr. Earl kept running the hardware store until his untimely death in the summer of 1971. He was 83 years old when he died. And even to his death, he held that picture of him and Jeph proudly. The hardware store closed its doors in the spring of 1981 and has since remained a vacant building.

I became a writer, as you can possibly tell. I reside in Crescent with my wife and daughter.

I still visit Mayhew but now as an adult it just isn't the same. It used to be a nice little town. Albeit a wonderful town. But now I'm an adult and a lot of my imagination has since faded away. What I kept of it I placed in my books but you know it as well as I do.... nothing really lasts forever.

I believe there is a little bit of Jeph Baylor in all of us. A wild and free spirit that yearns for wanderlust and the power that is in belief.

I think we all deep down have a superpower. Though it may not be fantastical or it may not make you superhuman. But there is a power we all have. The power of belief.

To live this life and know that there is immense beauty everywhere. All around you. We can travel distant lands through our minds.

When we dream, we enter places that are merely not in our grasp. Children are the most magical. We as children believe in the tooth fairy, and Santa Claus, and the easter bunny and all of those phantasmagorical characters. But when we become adults, we lose sight and touch of that belief. That imagination.

We complicate our lives with more pressing matters and lose grip of that old life we used to lead.

I have a very strong feeling that Jeph was a guardian angel, sent from the realm of Heaven or Barbelo to guide us and help us through a time when we were slowly coming undone as a family.

I think about Jeph almost every single day. He was such an integral part of my growing up. Sometimes I look on it like some sort of crazed fever dream. Regardless of whatever it actually was, it was the best and worst days of my life.

Like I said, a heart needs to heal, but you got to give it that push to heal. And well, Jeph Baylor was most definitely a push. No, he was not just a push. He was a shove. A magical and mystical shove. That was Jeph Baylor... my magic man. 

THE END!