I’m writing from Forrest City, Arkansas.

When my dad says it, it sounds like “Far City.” His accent gets thicker the farther east we drive. We’re headed Delta ways to tag team on some research for a new book.

This column isn’t about that book; it’s about my birthplace, the same town where my mother and father were born, the same place they left behind when I was four.

Around that time, my mom was being interviewed for a kindergarten teacher opening at a school district whose name I can’t currently recall. When the principal asked her where she’d been teaching previously, my mother said, “Forrest City.”

Except she didn’t say it as it reads; she said it like my dad still says it. Mom didn’t get the job because the principal didn’t hear “Forrest City” or even “Far City.”

He heard “Varsity.”

He thought my mom was telling him she’d been teaching “Varsity."

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Like I said, she didn’t get the job, but she was eventually hired to teach kindergarten at Sequoyah Elementary in Russellville, Arkansas. My dad was the counselor at Dwight. And the rest, as they say in the cliché, is history.]

When I think of home, I think of Russ-Vegas, the same town where I live now, the same place where my wife is from, where we both graduated high school.

But I was born in the Forrest City Medical Center. I spent most of my early Thanksgivings and Christmases in the Delta, hiking Crowley’s Ridge or dove hunting in my Uncle Johnny’s soybean fields.

It’s been a while since I’ve been “home,” which is what my dad still calls Forrest City. When we pull off I-40 onto Exit 241, the present melds with the past and ignites my memories. Taco Bell still stands right where it did back when I was a kid, back when my grandpa would take me there after we’d played a couple holes of golf. I was never one for golf, but I liked to drive the cart.

I liked to swim too. I liked to jump off the high dive at the country club’s pool, the same pool where my mother lifeguarded during summers off from teaching “varsity.”

There are bars over the windows of the barbecue joint where Dad and I stop for lunch. There’s a sign on the wall with the picture of a big, Dirty-Harry-looking revolver and the words: NOTHING IN HERE IS WORTH YOUR LIFE.

Bellies full of pulled pork, we head out to chat with a real-life crop-duster and a biology-teacher-turned-museum-curator after that. My dad comes alive around these old friends. His voice changes like it did somewhere east of Little Rock, right around Lonoke, as far west as kudzu grows.

Invigorated by the long-overdue conversations, Dad stays animated for the whole ride home, telling stories I’ve never heard, speaking in a voice I hope to capture in my new novel, the book that I was born to write.

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