This Be The Verse, Y’all

My Aunt Patsy died a couple of weeks ago. Today my cousins, her kids, were sorting her papers, and found this poem that her husband, Uncle Murphy, read at a going-away party my family held for me in 1983, when I left home to start my junior year at a residential high school. I had forgotten about the poem. Either Murphy (who died in ’87) or Patsy, or perhaps both of them, wrote it. My mom told me that Murphy recited it. I come from a very funny clan. Finding this in my in-box tonight delighted me:

You might recall that one of the greatest gifts ever came to me from Murphy and Patsy just a few months before they wrote that poem. I owe them so much, those two. May their memory be eternal!