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Born to a white father and a black mother, the author's children stood at the doorway to two worlds - and one was a world he'd never known. So he set off on a journey through their past.

My journey begins in the dentist's chair. The nurse's fingers are pressing dental dough into my lower incisors, and she and the doctor are playing dueling banjos with funny stories about their kids, when in walks another dentist, dropping by to say hello. "I've got a good one," he says cheerfully, and then he tells a racist joke. I can't recall the joke, only that it ends with a black man who is stupid. Dead silence. It's just us white folks here in the room, but my dentist and his nurse know my wife, who is black, and they know my son and my daughter, who are, as they describe themselves, tan and bright tan. How many racist jokes have I heard in my life? Five, maybe ten thousand, at least. But today -- for the first time, for who knows exactly why -- I am struck with a deep, sharp pain. I look at this man, with his pasty face, pale hair and weak lips, and I think: This idiot's talking about my son!

I want to shake him, shove him against the wall. I say nothing. Quickly, my dentist grabs a tool, the nurse extracts the dough, and the idiot leaves. But I remain behind in suspended animation. It isn't the joke. It isn't the tension in the air. It isn't even the idiot. It is my recognition: I've crossed a line, and I know I have, and I know that for an instant I've traveled to a place where white Americans don't go. I feel revulsion and anger at this man. I feel fear and anguish for my children. I feel helpless. Am I, I wonder, feeling like a black man?

A memory: A long time ago, when I was 8, maybe 9, I sat with my grandmother on the steps of her house in the country outside Chicago, snapping fresh beans. My grandmother was a large, stern woman with a baritone voice, round wire glasses and gray hair swept up in that old Gibson Girl fashion. I called her Big Grandma with fear and respect. That day, she told me she'd been to "the city" -- Chicago Heights, Ill., which in the 1950s was an industrial town of about 35,000. Big Grandma said she'd seen "coloreds" everywhere. Then she said this: While standing in line at the Walgreen drugstore, she'd heard one colored lady tell another colored lady, "I always carries a razor in my purse." Big Grandma said this with a dramatic inflection, a shiver and a kind of rage, but I missed her complex meanings.

Coloreds, I thought, what in the world are coloreds?

I had no idea. But from her tone, I knew not to ask. Instead, I decided that coloreds were people whose skin, for mysterious reasons, resembled a concoction of melted crayons stirred into a weird, beautiful swirl. I remember this thought so clearly because of my later amazement when I went to Chicago Heights with Big Grandma and she pointed out a "colored." I was disappointed. They weren't colored after all.

Three decades later, sitting in the dentist's chair, I'm struck by how much I am still like that little boy who believed he understood what he absolutely did not. Ten years of marriage to a black woman, two children, years of visiting my wife's family in rural Kentucky, years of births and deaths, years of hunting with my father-in-law, Alex, his brother Bobby and their friend Carl, years of shared bottles of Old Forester, shared jokes, lies and hunting knives -- years of what I believed was a life lived across the color line . . . Yet only today, for the first time, have I felt, felt, the intimate intrigues and confusions of race in America.

Only today, for the first time, have I crossed the line. MY WIFE'S FATHER, ALEX, SLIPS THE RUBBER BAND OFF THE large, tightly rolled paper, uncurls it, smooths it on the coffee table and then begins tracing the antecedents of his life. He starts in the upper left-hand corner, touching each name with the fingertips of his left hand: Tyler, Otha, Lou Emma, Annie, Beulah, Effie, Pratt, Samuel, Dollie and Shed, who was his father. He then follows the branches of the handwritten family tree to his mother, Stella, through the names of his four brothers, to his own name, to those of his two sons, to that of his only daughter, Keran, who is my wife, and beyond to my name and those of our children, Matthew and Kyle. For this genealogical tour, for a tour of another world, I have come to my in-laws' farm outside Glasgow, Ky., where Alex grew up.

Thank the idiot in the dentist's office: His callousness has made me realize that what I know -- about my wife and my children, about this thing called race -- is really nothing at all. I'm here for a simple and complicated reason: My children share a heritage that I may understand historically and intellectually but for which I have no intuitive, no emotional, grasp. I hope, somehow, to change that.

I think of Alex as a friend. He's a soft-spoken man who cannot, to my mother-in-law's constant consternation, be hurried no matter what the occasion. At 58, he's still handsome, lean and youthful. His sideburns and sparse mustache are sprinkled with gray. My children describe his complexion as brown-tan. He wears low-hanging Rustler jeans and a red-plaid flannel shirt over a crew-neck T-shirt, and he gently pads around the house in white socks. He's -- how shall I say it? -- something of an eccentric: He fries bull gonads for breakfast. (Served with well-seasoned brown gravy, they taste like tender chicken gizzards.) He maintains an antique Model A Ford, an antique Coke machine and an antique Seeburg jukebox. He drives a hundred miles for a bottle of moonshine whiskey to share with his friends. Posted at his driveway is a classic jockey-boy statue -- except that Alex has painted him bright white and named him Joe Zeller, after an old white friend. Alex is a country boy who left the country at 15, lying to the Air Force recruiter about his age. He had pure motivation to lie -- he was just a hot-step ahead of the law for having sold a few illegally garnered gasoline stamps during World War II. He laughs: It's hard to believe more than four decades have passed. A few years ago -- after serving in the Air Force in West Germany, England, France, California, Washington and Illinois -- Alex and his wife, Celeste, retired to Glasgow.

"I gotta die somewhere," he says, smiling.

This morning, Alex and I are up at 6:30 and on the road, a twisting, two-lane stretch of blacktop called Kentucky 90. We are driving to Alex's beginnings, on the only road that runs the 40 miles from Glasgow, a town of 12,646 people in southwest Kentucky, to Burkesville, a drab little burg set down in lavish forest along the Cumberland River. It's cold this morning, 35 degrees, but the Burkesville sky after dawn is so blue that it seems to disappear into itself, and the air is as clean as freshly washed glass. A hundred years ago, Burkesville -- or rather a place called Lawson Bottom 11 miles northeast of Burkesville -- was home to Alex's mother's family. Lawson Bottom was even named after her family, quite an accomplishment and quite an anomaly in the South of those days.

Alex didn't grow up in Lawson Bottom. His mother had migrated to Glasgow as a young woman, and Alex visited the farm only sporadically as a boy. Yet he has always seemed to have Lawson Bottom in him, carried its memory proudly, in a way that my wife and her brothers do not. As we make the final turn onto Lawson Bottom Road, Alex -- for at least the hundredth time -- tells me the story of taking his fiancee, Celeste, who was a college girl from a nice family of schoolteachers, to visit the farm in 1951. When they arrived at Lawson Bottom that first time, folks were so happy to see them that one of Alex's aunts called for a feast: "Paee-tehr," she yelled to her son, as Alex recalls with an exaggerated Cain-tucky accent, "go out and kill a chai-kin." Peter did -- shooting its head off with a single rifle shot. From somewhere deep inside, Alex laughs so hard that his car swerves briefly to the left. He loves that story. It inevitably makes city folks cringe, and it inevitably reminds Alex of how far he and his family and his race have come.

These days, the Lawsons are long gone from Lawson Bottom -- except for Alex's cousin Reid, a 66-year-old man who has lived away from the "holler" only six months of his life. When Alex and I pull into the drive, Reid is outside hefting the wooden top off the well. The pump has stopped, but he's unconcerned. Lawson Branch, a tiny mountain-fed stream, runs only 20 feet away, and it is an "everlasting" stream, as they call it, meaning that it never runs dry. If Reid must, he'll simply dip water from the branch for washing clothes or even for drinking, as the Cherokee Indians might have done 200 years ago. But that won't be necessary. Alex was a master sergeant and an airplane mechanic in the Air Force -- at least he was once they stopped dumping blacks into kitchen, janitorial and paper-shuffling jobs in the '50s -- and for the cost of a $4.50 electrical switch, he'll have Reid's pump whirring in a couple of hours.

While Alex works, Reid leads me toward the house, walking deliberately with his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his old green coat. He's a tall man, only slightly stooped with the years. He has been lean all his life, and only recently has he put on a little weight around the middle. He wears jeans, leather boots and a tan work shirt. On his head rests an orange hunting cap: "Burkesville Fertilizer." The hat sits back, angled to the right atop a full shock of chalk-white hair. "Let me put a dry stick in the stove," Reid says, heading back out the front door for five huge pieces of split cedar. I sit in a creaking chair, one of only three, and survey the single room in which Reid lives. It's as if I'm inside an old, sepia-toned photograph: the "Warm Morning" wood stove in the center of the room, the bare light bulb hanging overhead, the long on-off string running from the light and tied to the bedpost, the dog-eared Bible, the brown cross painted on the unpainted drywall, the strong and -- to my own weak, city-dweller nostrils -- nauseating smell of dead mice in the walls, a cold-weather condition that can't be avoided on the farm. Reid is like a movie frame halted in time, the living embodiment of where Alex's family began a century ago.

Through the clouded window next to his bed, Reid points to a tuft of young trees, mostly elm, just across the drive on this side of Lawson Branch. There stood the family homeplace, the house of patriarch Berry Lawson -- born 1865, died 1915. The legend of Berry Lawson has been handed down in the family for generations, and I have heard it not only from Reid but from my wife's grandmother, Stella, before she died and from my wife's great-aunt Minnie, a short, 81-year-old wisp of a woman with light, soft skin and wavy gray hair. She's known to everyone as Aunt G, after her middle name, Glatha.

There are no pictures of my wife's great-great-grandfather Berry, only the memories of his children, who say Berry Lawson was small and strong -- and nearly white, with muted African features and straight, jet-black hair. "Good hair," as Aunt G still calls it. Berry's parentage, like that of so many in the simultaneously Jim Crow and miscegenational Old South, was fuzzy. He was raised by a white bachelor farmer named Billy Mayes and his spinster sister, Sally. Everyone assumed Berry was Billy's son by a neighboring black woman, a Lawson, who died when Berry was 5. When Billy Mayes and Sally died, they left Berry the 250-acre farm. Reid says blacks and whites always got along in Lawson Bottom, but a black man -- even a half-black man -- owning so much land didn't sit well with everybody, particularly one rich white farmer who complained that no colored man should be allowed to own such fertile land.

But Berry did, and he set about raising his family with his wife, Ada. Their log cabin was magnificent against the shacks and shanties of other blacks. The house sat snugly between Lawson Bottom Road to the front and a 900-foot forest ridge to the rear. Its rough-hewn logs were sealed with wattle and daub and its roof was covered with foot-long split hickory shakes. Inside, the house was dominated by its massive, gray stone fireplace -- five feet high with a hearth big enough for a six-foot backlog and guarded by heavy dog irons that Berry Lawson had tempered in his own blacksmith shop in the barn.

The Lawsons had plenty, little cash, but plenty. They had nice clothes, and my wife's grandmother Stella would give her old dresses to poor blacks -- even to poor whites. For the winter, Berry Lawson stored mountains of 100-pound sacks of flour from wheat grown in his own fields. He grew corn, hay and tobacco; he raised cows, hogs, horses, mules, chickens and ducks. Each year, he put up 10 50-pound stands of lard. "Not even white folks had that much lard," Aunt G boasts. What the farm didn't produce, the steamboats on the Cumberland River delivered for barter -- candy, coffee and Red Rolling Fork whiskey packed four quart bottles to the cardboard box. Such affluence among blacks didn't go unnoticed.

As a girl, Aunt G once picked up the phone -- yes, the Lawsons had a phone -- and overheard two white women gabbing on the party line: "What're you eatin' tonight?" one white woman asked the other. "I don't know," came the reply. "The only person who's got anything is Ada Lawson. She's got everything." Aunt G laughs at the memory, a joyful little cackle that she mutes with a hand put discreetly to her mouth. "Of all the Negroes over there," she says, "we was the only ones with land and horses and wagons. All the others would be walkin', and we'd be ridin'." She laughs again. "They said we thought we was better, rich, because we were Berry Lawson's kids." Well, truth is, Aunt G did think she was better than the other Lawson Bottom blacks. "I thought it was their fault they were poor," she says with uncertain contrition. "I don't guess it was, lookin' back."

Even then, polite whites referred to blacks as "coloreds," which was Aunt G's preference. But for all her affluence, when some "poor white trash" would call her a "nigger" or a "blackbird" or a "darkie," there was nothing she could do about it, except seethe. Black and white children played together and ate lunches at each other's houses, became good friends, but it was a rare white child who didn't, when angered, resort to his ultimate weapon, racial slurs. The black kids would respond -- calling the white kids "peckerwoods," a slur against whites that they had often heard their parents use privately. But it never had the same sting: Without raw power to back it up, a slur is only a pinprick.

Aunt G especially hated the name-calling. She was so proud of her light skin and straight hair, and she hated being called a darkie. "I'd rather have been

called a 'nigger,' " she says bluntly. "We had lots of white blood." Aunt G's grandmother -- my wife's great-great grandmother -- was the light-skinned child of a slave-slave master union, but she married a very dark man. Sadly, Aunt G says, "All her kids had nappy hair. They had bad hair. She'd say, 'I don't know nothin' about combin' those nappy-headed children.' She made Grandpa tend their hair." It was a sentiment Aunt G would carry into her generation: "I just had a horror of little black children, just thought I couldn't tend to them. I don't know why. It's something within me." Aunt G says this matter-of-factly, without guilt or self-reflection. For her, as for so many, race and social class and skin color were hopelessly intertwined. For Aunt G, light skin became a stand-in for the respectability she craved, just as surely as other blacks' resentment of her light skin was in part a stand-in for their resentment of her prosperity.

It is time for Reid to go to work. Outside, the sun has warmed the morning and I unzip my coat as we walk to the tobacco barn several hundred feet toward the ridge -- past overturned and rusted trucks and automobiles, ancient and abandoned farm equipment, oil tanks and feeding troughs. In the barn, made of vertical, unpainted splinter wood, sweet-smelling tobacco stalks hang, curing, from three layers of crossbeams. Reid says, "Be sure to duck," but I hit my head hard anyway. He lights the kerosene heater and begins stripping the "trash" and the "lugs" from the three-foot-long tobacco stalks, leaving the lowest-quality leaves -- the "tips" -- for me to strip and bale for the burley market, where tobacco is bringing $1.67 a pound. "Ain't been much changed up here," Reid says finally, his breath hovering like a cloud in the windless barn. "Except whites and blacks go to school together and eat together." He laughs and hands me another stalk: "We'll make a farmer out of you yet." Reid and I strip and bale, strip and bale silently for a long time, until Alex has the well pump running again. Then Alex and I say goodbye, see you soon, Reid, and drive off, back into the 20th century, leaving the last Lawson in Lawson Bottom in the cold barn, still stripping tobacco.

I HAVE NO MEMORY OF EVER TALKING TO A BLACK PERSON until I was recruited to play with an all-black baseball team from Chicago Heights. I remember that, despite Big Grandma's biases, my working-class parents preached right-thinking attitudes about race: People are people and everyone should be treated the same. It was easy to think right on race in my midwestern surburban home town -- with no blacks, no Hispanics, maybe an Italian or two. As far as I knew, the platitude that people were people was correct -- people were people just like us, like me. I vaguely remember fat southern cops and vicious dogs on TV. I remember the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. being pelted in Cicero, which was only an hour's drive away. I remember thinking those Polacks were really ignorant.

Despite learning all these proper notions, though, I also discovered that I could make my parents vaguely uncomfortable if I spouted off too liberally about race. My sister even recalls a time in high school when I asked my mother, "So what would you do if I married a Negro girl?" I don't recall the taunt, but it sounds like me. I remember also that when Moses Turner, the coach of the all-black Chicago Heights baseball team, asked me to play for him the summer I turned 16, I was happy to agree. Big Grandma thought I'd gone mad. But I relished the renegade image I got playing on Moses Turner's team. I loved it when an umpire from my suburban league pulled me aside and asked angrily, "Why are you wasting your time with these niggers?" My little step across the color line seemed to make everybody uncomfortable, which I enjoyed immensely.

But that summer, I also learned something else. I became friends with the team's 6-foot-4 pitcher, Pee Wee -- a dark, strong kid who was an imposing athletic hero in his neighborhood. I often drove Pee Wee home after the games, and I can still see his street: wide and tree-lined and gray, with mangy dogs and broken bicycles, with grassless yards, tarpaper roofs, unpainted picket fences and missing screen doors. Kids were everywhere. The summer was 1967, and all around Chicago racial violence was breaking out. It was an angry time, and one day, as I turned onto Pee Wee's street, he said, in a voice husky and slow, "Whatever you do, don't hit one a these kids. There won't be nothin' even I can do for you." This wasn't a threat, but good advice, and you have never seen a person drive more carefully. After Pee Wee got out, I drove around the block and back to the highway so slowly people were staring at me. I smiled and nodded. I think I held my breath.

After that, I wasn't so eager to give Pee Wee a ride home.

THE SIGNS ON THE GAS PUMPS AT THE Gulf station in downtown Burkesville read: "You may have won a BMW." Driving past the station into town, it seems that nothing could be more out of sync with Burkesville. It's a town of pickup trucks, of old men with leather faces and weathered jackets standing outside the county courthouse across from the Dollar Store. When I stop a delivery man to ask directions, I see a large knife and a holstered pistol on the dash of his truck. Nope, this is not BMW country.

Alex has suggested I stop in Burkesville to talk with his cousin Nell, because at 55 she's the last Lawson Bottom native of her generation still in town. I've met Nell before, at Alex's home, and I'm embarrassed to admit the prejudices I revealed that day. Nell wore modest clothes, and her hair was parted in the middle and turned up with simplicity. She said, "Hello, nice to meet you." At least I suppose she did, because I couldn't understand a word. She was, it seemed to me, strictly backwoods. I imagined her as a character out of Alex's story about Lawson Bottom: "Paee-tehr, go out and kill a chai-kin."

Only after Nell left did Alex tell me she was a schoolteacher with a master's degree. I felt stupid, though in my defense, it also was the beginning of my realization that what I had assumed was poor, uneducated, black Kentucky dialect was simply Kentucky country dialect. As meeting Nell had reminded me, things aren't always as they seem. Tonight, as I sit down with Nell and her 25-year-old daughter, she is about to remind me of this again.

I ask innocently, "Who was your father?"

With hesitation and a deep breath, Nell says: "I'll be honest with you. My father was white and he never did pay me any attention. He would come to my mother's father's house and sit out, and I'd jump flips, but he paid me no attention." His attitude, Nell says, was, " 'Yes, I did this to your daughter and there's nothin' you can do about it!' " Nell's white daddy, it turns out, was the same rich white man who complained that no "colored" should be allowed to own land as fertile as Berry Lawson's. "I remember a kindly, round face with dark reddish hair," Nell says. "Maybe your height and a little chubby. When my father died, I didn't even go see him. I thought: 'If you don't care, I don't care either.' But I did care. I still do."

She pauses and no one speaks.

"I guess I didn't realize I really cared about my father just until you asked. I guess he's still controlling me from the grave. He never even spoke to me. I think he could have at least done that. I was called 'half-white' and 'bastard' by my own people. I don't know which was more painful. Just not being accepted by anyone, really. I've got a white half-brother right here in this town, and he does not acknowledge me. I've thought sometimes about calling him, but some things you just have to keep in the closet."

Nell's eyes are filled with tears now, as are mine. What to say? I think of good-hearted whites I know, even young affluent blacks, who would like this race thing, this ever-present race thing to disappear, go away, because life is different now, changed, better. Yes? Then I look at Nell, who is only 55, but who -- like any abused or beaten or abandoned child -- will carry this race thing forever. And beyond . . .

"I tell my daughters to stay away from white men," she says. "I'd be afraid they'd be using them the way we were done."

"But what about me?" I ask. "I'm a white man."

"I knew you were different," Nell says. At first, I think she's talking about my wife and me. But as she speaks, I realize she's talking about someone else too. "I knew that you wouldn't be ashamed to be seen walking down the street with me, that you'd do more than take me behind closed doors. You married her." I look at Nell's daughter, Donna, who is only 25. She says, "White men usually want one thing." What to say? Normally, this attitude would strike me as quaint, a throwback to another time and another place.

But not tonight, not in this town, this room, not in Nell's house.

I WENT TO COLLEGE IN 1968 THINKING I DIDN'T HAVE A RACist bone in my body. Then this happened: At the height of the Black Power movement, black students circulated a petition to turn a little-used building on our small midwestern campus into a meeting place for black students, which meant they'd be the only social group on campus with a building of their own. I didn't speak against this idea. I didn't campaign against it. But I did decline to sign the petition when it came my way, because I thought the idea was unfair to everyone else. I did not think this was a big deal. I was wrong.

Overnight, the several black members of my dormitory basketball team -- with these guys we were expected to be campus champs -- announced they wouldn't play as long as I was on the team. Shell-shocked and embarrassed, I offered to quit. But the team captain -- a big white guy with definite racist tendencies -- declared I would not resign. We would not be bullied! We would play without them! And that's what we did. To keep the peace, the college broke its own rule and allowed the black guys from all the dorms to form a team and play in the dormitory league. It was something of an event when my dorm played them, with me as point guard. We won that game, although it was little consolation. I'd been tarred as a racist, which was, I believe even 20 years later, too simple. I didn't know then that most blacks see the world as black or white, one or the other, and that to them the whole campus belonged to white students, while all they were seeking was one small, ramshackle building.

I was guilty, all right, but of believing people were people -- just like us, like me. I was guilty, all right, but of seeing the world through my own eyes, guilty of not yet knowing that justice isn't always fair.

LEWIS STREET IN THE KINGDOM . . .

The black places are gone today -- King's Restaurant, the Royal Cafe, Mr. Troop's barbershop, the pool and dance halls, Kurd's cab stand and, of course, the little gypsy restaurant Alex's father, Shed, ran in a tiny wooden trailer on rubber-and-spoke wheels near Lewis and Brown streets. In dry Glasgow in dry Barren County, Shed sold hooch from that trailer, as he also did from his kitchen half a block away at 506 Lewis, as his teenage sons Alex and Bobby later did on the streets. Shed's house has fallen to a modern brick funeral home today, and vacant lots and a B-Kwick Food Mart have replaced the rest. Alex can't help but be saddened by these changes. But he doesn't get too nostalgic, because the rats -- bold rats made fat and healthy at the feed mill on the corner of Lewis and Back streets -- also are gone. So is Red Row, a dozen or so leaning and dilapidated board and batten shacks, desperate even by Depression standards, that sat across and just up Back Street.

But the old Kingdom, the nickname for Glasgow's original few square blocks of black neighborhood, was the world as my children's mother's father's family knew it after they migrated from Burkesville to Glasgow in the 1920s. My children's great-grandfather was king of the Kingdom's bootleggers. Whites and blacks, rich and poor, visited Shed's kitchen with the devotion of churchgoers -- especially on Saturdays, when Glasgow's town square, only a few blocks north, would be packed with gawkers and talkers in from the fields. Shots of moonshine cost 3, 5 or 10 cents; pints 35 cents. Demand was great and Alex's job was to wash the Pepsi bottles, the old ones with the brown and green paper labels, so they could be filled with bootleg beer. Shed was a rough man, short and dark with a hard, cocky look in his eyes. He wore a skimmer hat and string ties. He told his sons he was a blacksmith, but Alex can recall seeing him with a horse only once. He worked as a janitor, a busboy, a carpenter, a bellhop and, for a long time, as a dishwasher at the Spotswood Hotel on the square.

But always, Shed was a bootlegger -- until the day Alex, 8 years old, watched as the police lugged jug after jug from beneath the house. Shed went to prison. He died soon after his release. For a time, my children's great-grandmother, Stella -- radiant, kind, gentle, religious Stella -- took over the family enterprise. "I got these five boys," she told Aunt G. But she too was busted. Finally, Stella retired from the business to do what respectable blacks did in her day: She worked as a housekeeper and nanny and as a maid in Glasgow's hospital. Before she died in 1981, Stella soberly described her predicament by telling me this story: A friend of hers once applied for a good factory job. The boss called her in and told her apologetically that he knew she could do the work, but that he also knew she was Mrs. Richardson's cook. And the boss, with a friendly laugh, said he couldn't have Mrs. Richardson mad at him for stealing her favorite cook, now could he?

The men I hunt rabbits with each year in Lawson Bottom -- Alex and his younger brother Bobby, who is 56, and their friend Carl, who is 55 -- all were bootleggers in the 1940s. In those days, Lewis Street was much like the corner drug markets that proliferate in American cities today. On weekends, a horde of young black males would mill about waiting for mostly white customers to drive through, roll down their windows and buy whiskey. Today, Alex, Bobby and Carl aren't embarrassed that they were bootleggers. They're proud of it.

"A black man couldn't get a good job in those days," says Bobby, a short, round man who absently lifts his blue cap and smooths his hand lightly over a bald head. Bobby, in Toughskins bib overalls and a gray hooded sweatshirt, is working at his barn today, creating a small corral of electric wire to enclose two black steers he plans to fatten for slaughter. Normally, Bobby leaves the castrated males in the cow herd as "markers" -- they mount and ride a cow when she's in heat, thus notifying the farmer it's time to mate her with a fertile bull. "Them steers got pistols," Bobby quips, "but they ain't got no bullets." We lift an old Agstar water trough into the barn and Bobby goes to get the hose to fill it. The late autumn afternoon is warm and bright, 51 degrees, and a white cat suns itself against the concrete foundation of the red rackside barn. In odd juxtaposition, the trees in the pasture are naked for the winter while the Kentucky grass still is green and growing. "Nope," Bobby says, picking up the thread again when he returns with the hose, "the best job a black could get was being a janitor, and there weren't many of them."

Bobby had a respectable job for a while after he dropped out of high school: He was a janitor at Glasgow's hospital, where his mother worked. He earned $100 a month and bolstered his income with light bootlegging. Then one day, Bobby saw the paycheck of a white kid whose job was to scrape gum off the hospital floors. "It was more than mine!" Bobby says, still incredulous. Bobby went to the hospital chief, a white man who was one of his best bootlegging customers, and asked for a raise. "Bobby," the chief said, "they won't let me pay coloreds what I pay whites." So Bobby quit and took up bootlegging full-time. At his peak, between the ages of about 16 and 19, three men sold whiskey for him. Bobby would drive the 32 miles to Bowling Green, where liquor could be bought legally, and pay $1.25 for a half pint, which he sold for $2.50. In his heyday, Bobby sold six cases of half pints, 288 bottles, a week. After paying his salesmen, that was $216 a week for Bobby, more than $800 a month -- compared with $100 at his respectable hospital job. He bought his mother clothes, gifts and groceries.

"Let me tell you," Bobby says, "you won't find a black in Glasgow who's got anything that, somewhere along the line, bootlegging didn't touch their lives. Very few. Because the people workin' weren't paid anything. It was either work and be dirt poor, or risk going to jail and be a bootlegger." Bobby finally did get arrested and went to court. But the Glasgow police chief had broken up the bootleg transaction before Bobby was paid, meaning no illegal sale had taken place. When Bobby's lawyer pointed this out to the all-white jury, the prosecutor was flabbergasted. "I'll never forget it," Bobby says, laughing. "He said, 'I guess we should put the chief of police in jail and turn this nigger loose.' " Bobby was acquitted. And eventually, he -- like Alex before him -- joined the military and got out of town a hot-step ahead of the law.

In those times, race was everywhere and nowhere. The movies, restaurants and public bathrooms were segregated, of course, as were the downtown Glasgow water fountains. As boys, Alex and Bobby gleefully rubbed their spit onto the spout of the whites-only fountain. Yet neither Alex nor Bobby can recall a single time anyone in Glasgow treated them rudely because they were black. Race was like a colorless, tasteless, odorless gas in the air. Alex remembers noticing that the football goal posts at his black school were always broken. He didn't question this. He remembers that he was once sent to a white school to pick up his teacher's paycheck and he noticed something amazing: On the tables in the white cafeteria sat entire bowls of fresh apples. Alex didn't think this was unfair, only that it was strange and mysterious. Bobby then tells this story: As he would walk to school, the white kids would ride by in their bus and make faces at him, but he would think nothing of it. "It's like the old joke about the Indian riding a horse with his squaw walking next to him," Bobby explains. "A guy asks the Indian, 'Why are you ridin' and your squaw's walkin'?' The Indian looks up at the man, thinks and then says, 'She no have 'em horse.' " We both laugh at the punch line.

"Well, it was like that," Bobby says. "We didn't have a horse."

Yet it's eerie how things no one seemed to notice can live so long, as in the mind of Alex and Bobby's friend and my hunting companion, Carl, who grew up outside Glasgow in a barn-wood shack. These days, Carl is never without at least the stub of a cigar working in the corner of his mouth. He's big as a bear, thick everywhere -- stomach, chest, neck, legs, arms, even his fingers. Not fat, thick. This morning, he's out checking on his cows, breaking the ice in their water trough with a shovel. He wears insulated camouflage overalls and green rubber boots. He has a deep, bass voice and a head that seems to sit directly atop his massive shoulders. He is gentle and threatening at once. As a boy, there was no black school near Carl, so he didn't start until he was 9. "I'm still awful proud I graduated high school," he says, "considering where I began." Next door was a nice white family who let Carl ride their pony. He took the rides but deeply resented the family. Carl believed then that he resented them so much because they were white. But looking back, he knows that skin color was only a stand-in: As the black kids in Lawson Bottom had resented Berry Lawson's kids because they were rich, Carl resented his white neighbors because they too were rich.

Unlike Alex and Bobby, who got out of town for decades, Carl has lived in Glasgow all his life. He worked at the Texaco station for 12 years -- as a "wash boy," scrubbing cars, cleaning the grease pit. He earned $60 a week, far less than his white co-workers. One day, Carl noticed that a white mechanic had worked on a car all morning and gone to lunch still unable to get it started. Carl got it started. The boss was so happy, he bought Carl a Coke. Finally, in 1965 Carl got one of the first area factory jobs that went to a black man. For the first time in his life, at 31, he was paid a white man's wage. He now drives a forklift at another factory and makes good money. He's now got good white friends. Thirty years ago, Carl would have said that was impossible. He marvels when he hears young black and white men at work bantering back and forth with racial digs. Even today, Carl couldn't do that without getting mad. He doesn't know exactly why.

Just the other day he was listening to a couple of young white men bragging about the University of Kentucky basketball team, and Carl felt as if they were pulling an invisible thread in his brain. He thought about the time three decades ago when he happened to sit down fishing next to UK's venerated coach, Adolph Rupp. That year, a local black basketball star was trying to get into Kentucky, which had never had a black player, and Carl asked Rupp if he was going to take him. "He can't pass the academic tests," Rupp said smugly. "Some schools will lower their standards to take him anyway, but not Kentucky."

Then Carl thought about all those years at the Texaco station, how he acted like "a nice colored man" when he sometimes wanted to slug the white men making more money for no more work. And about the day he got that car started and the boss bought him a Coke. A Coke! He thought about how they wouldn't let him go to school till he was 9, how far behind he was, how foolish he felt. He thought about the days when banks wouldn't lend a black $500 without a white co-signer, how as a boy he had to stand in the store and wait until all the whites were served, how even his daddy had to wait patiently, like a nice colored man.

And he got hotter and hotter.

"I had to catch myself not to say anything," Carl says. "These are good guys. They're 30 years old. They didn't know Adolph Rupp. But all that brings back through your head everything else that came before. It can eat at you. And you start lookin' for each and every thing. It eats you up. The next thing you know, you're angry and you don't know what you're angry about." THE SUMMER AFTER THE LAST SEASON I played baseball with Pee Wee, after my first year in college and who-knows-what for Pee Wee, I was with a girlfriend driving through Chicago Heights on the way to the Indiana dunes on Lake Michigan. I had what for me was a lot of money in my pocket. We stopped at a Tastee-Freez, and as we stood licking our cones in the sunlight, about a dozen black kids, maybe 13, 14 years old, rode up on their bikes and surrounded us in a shrinking half-circle against the shiny white wall.

"Got any change?"

Then, "Got any folding money?"

The next question seemed inevitable. So as I dug into my pocket, I asked, "Hey, any you guys know Pee Wee?" The boys glanced around at one another.

"You know Pee Wee, man?"

"Oh, yeah, Pee Wee and me, we go way back, man, played ball together."

Before long, we were laughing and swapping Pee Wee stories. Before long, I'd gotten away for small change. I drove carefully. I think I held my breath. THE KINGDOM THROUGH A DIFFERENT lens . . .

As children, my wife and her two younger brothers saw Glasgow as a foreign land. They were military brats, kids who'd spent half their childhoods in West Germany, France, England, on the West Coast, always in military housing, always attending military schools. Alex can tell some pretty grim tales about his early days in the military. The black soldiers' breakfasts were always cold because they were trucked over from the white kitchen. The only day blacks could use the swimming pool was Wednesday -- after which they changed the pool water for the week. He can't help chuckling at the memory. But by the middle 1950s Alex believed that no place in American society gave blacks a better shake. By then, everything in the military was integrated -- housing, clubs, jobs, schools.

Into this brave new world came my wife and her brothers. Their playmates were mostly white, and out of, say, 20 kids in a military school classroom, only one, two, maybe three, would be black. In Europe, there were no "Whites Only" signs and no one was turned away at a restaurant door. Keran and her brother Alex Jr. can't recall a time when they were overseas that race seemed to make a difference in their lives. Keran was wild about the Beatles and thought she'd really die if she couldn't marry Paul. Alex Jr. was always the most popular kid in his class. "I didn't know race was supposed to be a handicap," he says. Howard, the youngest, does remember that when the family went to the Oktoberfest in Munich, people stared awfully hard. He remembers noticing at picnics that children with southern accents seemed not to play with him much. But Howard must rack his brain for these memories.

So when the kids visited Glasgow, it was culture shock. Blacks and whites didn't mingle, and that was odd enough. But the rural poverty was shocking. Two generations out of Lawson Bottom, a generation out of the Kingdom, the kids would sit on the porch of the house Grandma Stella shared with Aunt G since their husbands had died, and look across Back Street at mind-boggling destitution. "It wasn't race," says Howard, who, after flying jets in the Air Force, is now a pilot for UPS. "It was poverty. It was poverty like in Africa." He remembers the nights they would listen to the people across Back Street chasing rats from their bedrooms. "We used to make fun of those people," says Alex Jr., now a casino executive in Las Vegas. "I just couldn't comprehend them." Of his father's beloved Kingdom, he says: "The whole area around Aunt G's was a craphole. And all the black kids had these strange accents. It was hillbilly to me. I had the sense of not wanting to be associated with them."

My wife and her brothers all went to college. Today, they all have good jobs. And they all say that, as far as they know, being black has only helped them. My wife always jokes that as a black woman she fills two quota slots as a manager at Cigna Corp. Alex Jr. figures he got shots at the two biggest jobs in his career because he's black. Howard says UPS didn't even answer his job letter until he sent a picture. "Maybe I'm going through life with blinders," he says, shaking his head, "but when I hear people crying, 'Racism, racism,' I say, 'What are you talking about?' I just haven't seen it." Yes, there were occasional racial slurs at the mostly white Mascoutah, Ill., high school they attended when the family finally moved off base. Yes, they remember family vacations in the 1950s when motels in the States turned them away. Yes, they remember some mean redneck stares. And, yes, they also remember stares from black kids, who seemed angry and resentful of their white friends. "I noticed it, but I didn't let it bother me," Howard says. "I've been stared at all my life -- at the Oktoberfest, in Mascoutah and years later when I'd take planes into Iceland. People stare for a minute and then they come up and talk to you. It hit home very early that through hard work you can make it too. That wasn't true in my dad's day. And that's different."

I think of what Bobby had said about his emasculated cattle: "Them steers got pistols, but they ain't got no bullets." Today poverty, poor education and lack of opportunity -- the ageless barriers of class -- are formidable obstacles to black achievement. But the power of racism, though still strong and ugly, is greatly diminished. For my wife and her brothers -- for an entire generation of well-educated young blacks and their children -- racism, like Bobby's steers, is more and more a pistol without bullets. A slur or a stare, yes, but they're not being turned away because Mrs. Richardson needs a cook. I DIDN'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT KERAN was when we first met. She's got rising cheekbones, electrified hair and a nose that isn't European, but she has no accent except middle American and her skin is the color of honey. "Maybe," I told a friend, "she's part Filipino." He said, "No, she's black." I didn't think much about it, and when I first met her parents a month later and saw that she really was black, I didn't think much about it then either. Keran was the only black woman I'd ever dated, and I simply told myself that I would not let race matter, that I was beyond it. Besides, marriage wasn't on my screen in those days.

My mother, it turned out, was more farsighted. When my sister told her I was dating a black woman, I got an anguished late-night call from my mom, asking me, please, to think about what I was doing, please, think about the children. I told her not to worry, that I hardly knew the woman, that I wasn't marrying anybody for a long time.

She said, "But this is how these things start."

My mother the prophet. Five years later, Keran and I were married. In the years we had dated, strange as it seems, we never had a problem with race that I knew of. I never heard a slur. I didn't notice stares. Nobody seemed to care. I was amazed at this and always figured it had to do with Keran, who didn't wear race as a badge, who talked middle-class talk, and who was light-skinned enough that whites weren't knee-jerk threatened by her.

But I never forgot my mother's phone call, and, about a year before we married, I broke off with Keran. I told myself it was because I wasn't ready to get married, but I knew even then it was also because I feared my parents' reaction. If I were going to marry Keran, I reasoned, I'd better be awfully sure about it. After a few months apart, I was sure.

My parents, who had always taught me to think right about race, freaked out. I'd always been a rebellious kid, and in the '60s -- with marijuana, long hair, strange clothes and radic-lib ideas -- my folks saw me purposely rejecting their beliefs. Keran knew better. She joked, "You have to marry a black woman -- to prove you're not hopelessly middle class." Indeed, it was my hopelessly middle-class sensibility that attracted her. "I can't marry a jive man," she said. But my folks believed my marriage mocked their values and squandered their sacrifices. "I'm sure Keran is a nice girl from a nice family," my mother said. "This has nothing to do with her." In their minds, as in the minds of so many, race and social class and skin color were hopelessly intertwined.

My parents were dirt poor as children. They struggled all their lives, sacrificed, to keep me in a decent home, decent schools. They struggled to move me up and out. In their view, my marrying across the color line was moving down, not up. I was throwing away all their sacrifices. Who'd hire me? Who'd have me to dinner? What nice neighborhood would take me? We didn't talk for years after my marriage. Then one day, as my mother looked through photos I'd sent -- photos of my nice home, my nice yard, my nice kids -- she made this telling remark to my sister: "It looks like your brother has built a life for himself." Soon, we were a family again.

Keran's parents had a different reaction: They said not a word about race. Alex asked, "You mean you're marrying that scrawny guy?" They remained true to their lifetime belief that race shouldn't matter, that it should never be an excuse or an explanation, that it should be ignored, pretended away. Their philosophy was simple: Blacks must act as if they can control their lives, whether or not they can. Otherwise their ambition is sapped and their lives consumed by self-pity. It is the way they have lived their lives, the way they have raised their children.

Alex's advice: Ignore the idiot in the dentist's office. He takes too much energy. He's a jerk, and there are few enough like him today that he can be ignored. Perhaps this was once an illusion, a psychic defense for blacks, but not by the time my wife and her brothers were growing up. And certainly not by the time of my children. I feel like Howard does. Maybe I'm going through life with blinders, but I can't think of a time when I or my wife or our kids have been mistreated because of race. Oh, I know the neighborhood was abuzz when we moved in. Since my revelation in the dentist's chair, I've heard my son's little league coach talk about the "niggers" and a neighbor joke about the "coons." I hate this. But in the end, these things are pistols without bullets. As it was even in Aunt G's day, a slur without the power to back it up is only a pinprick. My wife and I can work, live where we want and send our kids to the schools we choose. This is not true for all blacks, but it is true for us, with our power of affluence.

It turns out I'm not the pioneer I thought I was. Because it wasn't me or even my children who first crossed the color line. It was Alex and Celeste, my wife and her brothers and so many other blacks, all of whom ventured into the mainstream white world to face stares and slurs from whites as well as blacks. Thanks to them, not me, life is nearly normal for my children. About that I breathe easier.

But not too easy: The worst barriers are gone, but the confusion about race, class and color lives on in all of us, as I'm forever reminded. WITH MY KIDS, I PULL INTO THE McDonald's drive-through. We are in a hurry, and as I come to the squawk box, I see that the car ahead of me has four black people in it. In an instant, my mind makes its unconscious and racist calculation: We'll be sitting here forever while these people decide what to order. I literally shake my head at the awfulness of this thought. I laugh at my own deep prejudice. Then I wait. And wait. And wait. Each of the four people in the car ahead leans out the window and orders individually. The order is changed several times. We sit and sit, and now I am shaking my head again. I know that the buried sentiment that made me predict that these people would be disorganized on the basis of race alone was wrong -- bad, not nice, racist. I know there are dozens of other reasons for their behavior, that race was only a convenient stand-in for social class or education or individual stupidity or rudeness. But the prediction was right. So now I chide myself for my racism, then I laugh to myself at my racism's unfortunate predictive power, then I shake my head again, this time at the conundrum that is race in America.

I think of Winston Churchill's line: "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." THAT RIDDLE IS ESPECIALLY CONFUS- ing to the young. My 4-year-old daughter, for instance, came home from Kinder-Care one day recently and announced that she didn't like the black boys in her class. They were too rough. I'm always fearful of my children being trapped somewhere between black and white, and I try again and again to make them see that race is only a stand-in for deeper explanations. As we talked, it became clear that Kyle didn't really like any of the boys in her class, white or black, which is all I wanted her to understand. In our family, when we talk about how someone looks, my wife and I always ask if the person is tall or short, hefty or thin, dark-haired or light-haired, blue-eyed or brown-eyed, light-skinned or dark-skinned. It was not until my son was in first grade that we saw the impact of this. Matthew came home the first day of school and said there were no black kids in his class. Concerned, I went to his classroom -- and found about a dozen black kids.

"What about him?" I asked, nodding toward a black child.

"He's not black," Matthew said, as if I were blind. "He's dark brown."

Yet the seductive power of race as an explanation, as a predicter of behavior, is great. One day, Matthew came home and asked why the dark-skinned kids in his class didn't know as much as the light-skinned kids. As we talked, he realized that he didn't really mean all the dark-skinned kids, but a lot of them. What to say? I gave a little history lesson about slavery, about bad schools, about being locked out of good jobs, about how parents with good educations often start their children reading earlier, about how just because a child doesn't read or add well doesn't mean he isn't smart, only that he's behind in reading or adding. Matthew interrupted.

"Dad, Dad!" he said. "This is booor-ing!"

Okay, okay, but sometimes I think, I hope, the message is heard. In psychology, there's a classic experiment in which black kids are asked whether a white or a black doll is prettier. For decades, black children have more often picked the white doll. I once played a game like this with my light-skinned, sandy-haired, hazel-eyed daughter. I laid out five of her dolls -- a dark brown Cabbage Patch doll; a pale white cloth doll; a light tan doll from Mexico; a white, blond-haired Barbie doll; and a black friend of Barbie's named Dee-Dee. I asked Kyle to pick the prettiest dolls: In order, she selected the blond Barbie, the black Dee-Dee, the pale white cloth doll, the tan doll from Mexico, and the dark brown Cabbage Patch doll. I asked why.

Barbie? "She has dangly earrings."

The black Dee-Dee? "She has pretty lipstick."

The pale white cloth doll? "She has a diaper."

The tan doll from Mexico? "She has pigtails."

The dark brown Cabbage Patch? "I don't like him because he's bald."

Except that I am going bald, I liked her answers. I know that many blacks don't judge racial progress on whether people are increasingly colorblind and whether blacks and whites mingle together more in society. But I do, and for obvious reasons: My children stand at a doorway to two worlds. I want them to feel comfortable in both, and I want their world -- the world between the races -- to grow and expand, for the races to melt together, for either-or to disappear. Blacks and whites work together now. We live as neighbors, go to school together, dine together. So much has changed.

My wife's living family encompasses this great arc of race history and psychology, of change and sad similarity: Reid, still stripping tobacco; Aunt G, still proud of her light skin; Nell, still anguished over racism's oldest crime; Carl, still stoically fighting his silent anger; Bobby, still proud that he bootlegged rather than work for next to nothing; Alex and Celeste, still bridging the old world of their childhoods and the new world of their children; my wife and her brothers, learning to live between two worlds long before I came along. Before my journey, I'd known my wife's family and friends for a decade, but rarely had we really talked. After my journey, I will never again think they are just like us, like me.

It's hard not to see the story of my wife's family as an American triumph. So much has changed. What remains, though, is the taboo of men and women and marriage across the color line.

I've often thought one of the reasons blacks haven't melted into the American melting pot is because they've been unable to marry across the line, as have Italians and Irish and all the other once-despised immigrant groups. Blacks haven't been able to marry the boss's daughter and move into the house on the hill, which has had a very real impact on their wealth and opportunity. Remember, Berry Lawson began with the luck of birth and inheritance. But the marriage taboo also exacts a deeper price. It means that the lives of blacks and whites rarely cross in the intimate, human ways that make the burying of differences among people not just a noble social goal, but an emotional necessity. To this day, for instance, Aunt G -- chatting from the recliner in her sitting room, with the TV ignored and glowing orange beside her -- tells me she will not eat meals with white people. For years, they wouldn't eat with her, and now she will not eat with them.

Surprised, I say, "But you eat with me."

"Oh, that's different," Aunt G says pleasantly. "You're family." MY LAST VISIT WITH AUNT G . . .

The sitting room is a shrine of photographs -- her sister, her brothers, daughter, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews, a great-nephew. Every inch of wall is covered. People of all shapes and shades. From here, Aunt G holds court. As a young woman, she moved to Glasgow from Burkesville and married the whitest, richest black man she met. This made sense to her, a woman proud of her light skin and straight hair, a woman accustomed to being relatively well-to-do. She and Mr. Troop, a barber and businessman, had a daughter -- beautiful Mackiva, with soft, pearly skin and flowing, wavy hair. Aunt G, who feared she simply couldn't care for a dark-skinned child, was elated.

Her daughter felt differently. "The kids would call me a half-white, stringy-hair bitch," says Mackiva, who today is 56. Mackiva, who was so light-skinned that when she rode the bus to college in Nashville she sat in the front with the white people, did a 180-degree turn on her mother's outlook. "I decided I'd never marry a bright-skinned man," she says. "My kids would never go through what I went through." And that's what Mackiva did: Her husband, Evans, is handsome and dark-skinned, as are their three grown sons, as are their grandchildren, who are Aunt G's great-grandchildren.

Aunt G turns to me. "Your children are white," she says rather abruptly, using her own either-or standard to describe my tan-skinned children. "So many whites have a horror of black babies. You didn't know what you'd have. How could you have coped if you'd had a black child?"

I can't help but smile. The query brings me full circle, because today Aunt G is baby-sitting her great-grandchildren, Brittany, age 2, and Michael, 6 months old, who are on the floor before us. They are, in Aunt G's vocabulary, black children. "Aunt G," I say, "you were the woman who was terrified to have black babies. You married a bright man. Then your daughter goes off and marries a dark man and has dark children, who then go off and have these dark grandchildren. Let me ask you, How do you cope?" Aunt G looks startled for a moment, and then she lets out that joyful little cackle that she mutes with a hand put discreetly to her mouth. "I got one as black as July jam and another with hair nappy as a sheep's back," she says, cackling freely now. "And I just love 'em better than anything! I just love 'em!"

And that, really, is the heart of the matter.

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Born to a white father and a black mother, the author's children stood at the doorway to two worlds - and one was a world he'd never known. So he set off on a journey through their past. My journey begins in the dentist's chair.

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A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home.

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One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. We returned summer after summer--always on August 1st for one month. I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week's fishing and to revisit old haunts.

I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows. On the journey over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot--the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated. It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves which lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral. The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There were cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming although the shores of the lake were quite heavily wooded. Some of the cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. That's what our family did. But although it wasn't wild, it was a fairly large and undisturbed lake and there were places in it which, to a child at least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval.

I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the shore But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before--I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom, and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.

We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floor boards the same freshwater leavings and debris--the dead helgramite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday's catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and wells. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one--the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of.

We caught two bass, hauling them in briskly as though they were mackerel, pulling them over the side of the boat in a businesslike manner without any landing net, and stunning them with a blow on the back of the head. When we got back for a swim before lunch, the lake was exactly where we had left it, the same number of inches from the dock, and there was only the merest suggestion of a breeze. This seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water. In the shallows, the dark, water-soaked sticks and twigs, smooth and old, were undulating in clusters on the bottom against the clean ribbed sand, and the track of the mussel was plain. A school of minnows swam by, each minnow with its small, individual shadow, doubling the attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight. Some of the other campers were in swimming, along the shore, one of them with a cake of soap, and the water felt thin and clear and insubstantial. Over the years there had been this person with the cake of soap, this cultist, and here he was. There had been no years.

Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and the splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative. But the way led past the tennis court, and something about the way it lay there in the sun reassured me; the tape had loosened along the backline, the alleys were green with
plantains and other weeds, and the net (installed in June and removed in September) sagged in the dry noon, and the whole place steamed with midday heat and hunger and emptiness. There was a choice of pie for dessert, and one was blueberry and one
was apple, and the waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain--the waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference--they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair.

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat, wondering whether the newcomers at the camp at the head of the cove were "common" or "nice," wondering whether it was true that the people who drove up for Sunday dinner at the farmhouse were turned away because there wasn't enough chicken.

It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great importance of the trunks and your father's enormous authority in such matters, and the feel of the wagon under you for the long ten-mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished body of water. The shouts and cries of the other campers when they saw you, and the trunks to be unpacked, to give up their rich burden. (Arriving was less exciting nowadays, when you sneaked up in your car and parked it under a tree near the camp and took out the bags and in five minutes it was all over, no fuss, no loud wonderful fuss about trunks.)

Peace and goodness and jollity. The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors. This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving. In those other summertimes, all motors were inboard; and when they were at a little distance, the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep. They were one-cylinder and two-cylinder engines, and some were make-and-break and some were jump-spark, but they all made a sleepy sound across the lake. The one-lungers throbbed and fluttered, and the twin-cylinder ones purred and purred, and that was a quiet sound too. But now the campers all had outboards. In the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made a petulant, irritable sound; at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water, they whined about one's ears like mosquitoes. My boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire was to achieve single-handed mastery over it, and authority, and he soon learned the trick of choking it a little (but not too much), and the adjustment of the needle valve. Watching him I would remember the things you could do with the old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually. Motor boats in those days didn't have clutches, and you would make a landing by shutting off the motor at the proper time and coasting in with a dead rudder. But there was a way of reversing them, if you learned the trick, by cutting the switch and putting it on again exactly on the final dying revolution of the flywheel, so that it would kick back against compression and begin reversing. Approaching a dock in a strong following breeze, it was difficult to slow up sufficiently by the ordinary coasting method, and if a boy felt he had complete mastery over his motor, he was tempted to keep it running beyond its time and then reverse it a few feet from the dock. It took a cool nerve, because if you threw the switch a twentieth of a second too soon you would catch the flywheel when it still had speed enough to go up past center, and the boat would leap ahead, charging bull-fashion at the dock.

We had a good week at the camp. The bass were biting well and the sun shone endlessly, day after day. We would be tired at night and lie down in the accumulated heat of the little bedrooms after the long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens. Sleep would come easily and in the morning the red squirrel would be on the roof, tapping out his gay routine. I kept remembering everything, lying in bed in the mornings--the small steamboat that had a long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi, and how quietly she ran on the moonlight sails, when the older boys played their mandolins and the girls sang and we ate doughnuts dipped in sugar, and how sweet the music was on the water in the shining night, and what it had felt like to think about girls then. After breakfast we would go up to the store and the things were in the same place--the minnows in a bottle, the plugs and spinners disarranged and pawed over by the youngsters from the boys' camp, the fig newtons and the Beeman's gum. Outside, the road was tarred and cars stood in front of the store. Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more Coca Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla. We would walk out with a bottle of pop apiece and sometimes the pop would backfire up our noses and hurt. We explored the streams, quietly, where the turtles slid off the sunny logs and dug their way into the soft bottom; and we lay on the town wharf and fed worms to the tame bass. Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.

One afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came up. It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe. The second-act climax of the drama of the electrical disturbance over a lake in America had not changed in any important respect. This was the big scene, still the big scene. The whole thing was so familiar, the first feeling of oppression and heat and a general air around camp of not wanting to go very far away. In mid-afternoon (it was all the same) a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then the way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills. Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain. And the comedian who waded in carrying an umbrella. When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

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One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August.

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List the elements of an Awesome lesson below.

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List the elements of an Awesome lesson below.

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https://humanresources.dearbornschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/103/2013/09/Dainelson-Components-23.pdf

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The National Center on Universal Design for Learning at CAST. Together we can change the world.

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1.  Why will my students care about this lesson?
2.  In what ways can I share the ideas and information in this lesson?
3. in what ways can students develop and demonstrate their learning?

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*STAR
*RADAR
*BRANCHING
*The Text Model

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Diana Gabaldon - The Outlander Series. I've been reading her work for over 20 years. Character development is a strength.

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J.K Rowling for her ability to draw me into another world and as a way to connect with other adult and students.

As a "kid" I couldn't get enough of Judy Blume and find that I still enjoy that style of writing.

Still enjoy young adult books.

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I suppose I will choose Ken Follett (today) as my favorite writer. I love historical fiction, and his books are so well researched, I feel as if I am there. His dialogue is fresh and realistic and pulls me right in...

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I suppose I will choose Ken Follett (today) as my favorite writer. I love historical fiction, and his books are so well researched, I feel as if I am there. His dialogue is fresh and realistic and pulls me right in...

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I do not have a favorite, but I have liked the following:

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I do not have a favorite, but I have liked the following:

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Myself
Poe
Collins
Sparks
The lady who wrote Victoria
Dahl
Hinton
The lady who wrote the True Blood series
Dr. Seuss

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A writer that hooks me in and I can't put the book down. I writer that develops a plot I personally connect to. Frederik Backman.... my children.

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A writer that hooks me in and I can't put the book down. I writer that develops a plot I personally connect to. Frederik Backman.... my children.

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A writer who has a craft that is impressive.
Memoirs that show strength and resilience.

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Mary Balogh- She writes historical romance novels based in the 1800s, in England.  I'm a nerd like that!:-)

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Mary Balogh- She writes historical romance novels based in the 1800s, in England.  I'm a nerd like that!:-)

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She develops each character well and uses lots of imagery. She also uses advanced vocabulary which at times, I have to look up!

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He writes about American culture with such style. He mixes long sentences with fragments so well,it seems that he's talking directly to me. He describes not just actions but what those involved might be thinking- their intentions and motivations. He also points out ironies and oddities of parts of culture that makes the reader questions the worth of something.

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Purpose clear and communicated to students

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Purpose clear and communicated to students

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Includes engagement for all learning styles, visual, audio, kinestic

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Includes engagement for all learning styles, visual, audio, kinestic

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Visual aide such as a picture or video to prompt discussion

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Visual aide such as a picture or video to prompt discussion

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Writing time

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there is multiple media forms used for the teacher to communicate

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there is multiple media forms used for the teacher to communicate

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images, text, video, etc

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what did I learn? What did I do to reach the lesson goal?

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Motivated Students:)

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Conference with students

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It's messy and loud (learners talk with the teacher and others)

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Include how to use the learned skills in the real world

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Include how to use the learned skills in the real world

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sequenced questions so all students can comprehend

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sequenced questions so all students can comprehend

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Share ideas

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Choice (of topic, genre, etc.)

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maybe some thinking routines from Tools for Mental Engagement

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maybe some thinking routines from Tools for Mental Engagement

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Student driven - not always data or pace driven

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Student driven - not always data or pace driven

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mistakes being made

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choice for students to present their work

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choice for students to present their work

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Find a way to motivate students within the lesson.

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Find a way to motivate students within the lesson.

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Make connections and make it personable.

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Make connections and make it personable.

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standards and lesson goals are made relevant and purposeful.

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standards and lesson goals are made relevant and purposeful.

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At a point, facilitate instead of teach.

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At a point, facilitate instead of teach.

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options for kids with special needs:  text to speech, speech to text, etc.

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options for kids with special needs:  text to speech, speech to text, etc.