The real dilemma of existence is not deciding what new beliefs to add to your mirror, but learning how to discover and remove old beliefs that no longer serve you. 

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Slates are blackboards. But after two hours of being chalked and erased by Miss Rhodes' flying hands-arithmetic practice-they weren't black anymore. The smear of chalk had turned them gray. That's where I came in with my bucket and sponge. Penal labor.

After recess the slates were black again and ready for-God help us all-division of fractions by fractions. What pointless nonsense would Miss Rhodes dream up next?

While the other kids were busy learning what a third of a half would be, I was mentally grumbling to myself about the loss of another recess. What if nobody misbehaves? Who would clean the slates? Somebody has to goof up or the slates will never get cleaned. Miss Rhodes isn't about to clean her own slates. Eventually the chalk smear will build up to a level where nobody will be able to write or read anything. I wonder if any teacher has ever had to dismiss a class because nobody misbehaved and the slates are dirty.

A sharp poke between the shoulder blades interrupted my reverie. It was Miss Rhodes' yardstick of justice. Oh, no. I couldn't believe my ears. "For not paying attention, Master Palmer, you will stay after class and clean the slates again."

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When Raleigh and Faith had their first baby (an event that was to become a yearly occurrence for the next decade), Raleigh built a bedroom onto his trailer. And then a year later, when the second child arrived, he built a kitchen onto the bedroom. Nothing was ever torn down, just add-ons. You had to go through a bathroom to get from the kitchen to the dining room. The dining room table was an empty wire spool from the electric company, and worn seats from junked cars, propped on bald tires, completed the dining decor.

Years passed and Raleigh's home additions sprawled in all directions. And these were not fancy additions. Not at all. They were built with whatever was available-used cinder blocks, plywood, pop crates, tar paper. A conglomerate of passing opportunity.

Earl and Prudence Usual did the same thing across the road. Earl managed to incorporate the hulk of an old school bus into his creation. The emergency door of the school bus became his front door. Auto hubcaps served as shingles on a side porch extending over a small creek. The porch was used as the spare bathroom. The toilet was a modified bus seat nailed to the wall above a hole in the floor. The opposite wall, the one that faced the road, was a salvaged plate-glass window painted with, "Lucky's Garage, 24-hour Emergency Service." Below this lettering was a uniformed service attendant holding a wrench and then in script along the bottom, "Got an emergency? Get Lucky."

There was a common rumor about Earl. An out-of-state hunter had a flat tire and left his van next to Earl's house. When he came back for it at the end of buck season, he discovered that Earl had attached the van to the house and was using the back for a woodshed and the front for a chicken coop.

There probably wasn't a lot of truth to this rumor, but folks liked to repeat it anyway It was a social icebreaker. Everybody knew the Usuals. The women at the local Grange Hall sighed in sympathy at the mention of the ever- pregnant Hokum girls. "Poor Prudence and Faith. How did they end up with the Usual boys? At least they all seem well-fed." (Both brothers kept poultry and passable gardens, but their bumper crop was babies.)

Children of my age, who sometimes inquired prematurely about their own origin, were often told, "Oh, we found you under a cabbage leaf (or in a spare tire) in the Usual's garden." That teasing created a suspicion in many children that remains to this day, "Am I Usual?"

It was our mail carrier who seemed to have the clearest insight into Usual psychology. "Those boys are real good at diggin stuff up, but they don't know a dang about throwin stuff away."

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He told me that there are some canvases in the Louvre that have been painted over so many times that the restored picture does not resemble any of the original paintings.

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The real dilemma of existence is not deciding what new beliefs to add to your mirror, but learning how to discover and remove old beliefs that no longer serve you. Covering over old beliefs with new beliefs just results in more pretense and neurotic behaviors.

Before Avatar, a lot of people were trying to find themselves in front of bulletin boards.

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