Ode To Merka
I came of age living outside of a central Texas town of Moulton, population (at that time) of 792. I went to school in Shiner, which was a 24-mile round-trip commute, and at the tender age of 14 and without a license, I ferried my siblings to and from school in the 1973 Ford Country Squire station wagon, with faux wood panelling.
Moulton was the quintessential Texas tank town, located in the heart of the German-Czech belt of central Texas. Downtown was centered on the railroad tracks, though the freighters rarely stopped there, even at that time. The central district was two blocks long, and was anchored by the Catholic church at the north end, and the bar at the south.
Downtown Moulton consisted of the hardware/farm store, the bank, and the general store. On the other side of the tracks was Pilat’s restaurant (later Kloesel’s steak house), which served the most amazing dinner (mid-day farmer’s meal) you’d ever want to lay into. On Saturday, the men gathered behind the hardware store to smoke meat, and by 3pm it was gone though the aroma lingered long afterwards.
At the cross-road where our farm road met the big town, there was Barta’s store. Here you could fill up the tank with hand-pumped gas, while you shopped for homemade sausage and ammunition.
I learned to drive on a Ford 2000 tractor, and I got my first gun — a Browning lever-action .22 rifle — for my eighth Christmas. My first experience shooting a gun wa
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