In the Rearview Mirror

The hearts of the people depicted in this book are for the most part as pure and white as the drivcn snow. Well, most of the time anyway. There is little malice in their blunderland, you might say (but probably wouldn't). Take, for example, my friend Jack Weldon's well-meaning but flawed odyssey when he guided - much like Moses - his innocent Lubbock High Schoo classmates on their senior trip to Sligo, Texas, a host town that turned out to be sort of a ghost town. The school board members, you see, had mandated that it be a day trip no longer than a certain number of miles from Lubbock because, in their wisdom, they reasoned that an overnighter would surely result in half the class returning home as mothers-to-be. So Jack simply took a compass with a pointy end that he placed on Lubbock, calibrated how far he could go with the circle's outer extremity to conform to the school board's edict, and settled on Sligo. It turned out to be a disaster, despite Jack's having tried his best to avert such an outcome. But you nevertheless must admire him for trying. There are certain other "anticdotes" that came along in Lubbock and elsewhere that are described in somewhat sordid detail in this collection of newspaper columns that I hope will evoke a tear or two - not in sadness but hopefully in joy - as I delve into occasional supercilious silliness while exploring some of life's foibles that have cropped up along the way. And as you, dear reader, travel life's byways, please always be cognizant of my old Uncle Ben's deeply thought-out truism which is, to wit, that "it takes a mighty big dog to weigh a ton."

-- Jerry W. "Slats" Jackson