Intact, at least physically, and able to maintain continence for at least part of the trip, I arrived in Gadsden at the Wells house about four years later, or, at least four years older. There, I remained for the next nine days. As before, I’ll only share some of the highlights.

Ben himself is an interesting person. When we went to Deepwater Junior High School together, then a year of high school, he was relentlessly teased, being called “Skinny Benny” because of his slight stature. Looking back, I suspect he had some type of malabsorption syndrome which prevented him from becoming fat like all the bullies who made fun of him. 

During our recent correspondence he mentioned how he’d really “bulked up,” but when I saw him (it had been at least 7-8 years), he looked about the same. He didn’t want ANY pictures taken of him because of his plan to be in the CIA but a friend of his and I conspired to snap a quick shot before he could duck out of sight.. 

Heart

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He really was a fantastic guy who, for no reason I could ever determine, had a low self esteem when he lived in Texas which hadn’t improved since he moved to Alabama. 

He expressed this by touting a “profound knowledge” of a broad number of topics, especially the martial arts, and I learned how ANYthing can be used as a weapon… a pen, car keys, a ring. He certainly had a working knowledge of the martial arts, at least verbally.

The topic of our conversations became so redundant that, out of curiosity, I counted the number of times he used the first person singular pronoun “I.” It ended up being forty times in five minutes, averaging once every 7.5 seconds, which was about average for him. One of those sentences was “I am one of the most modest, too." 

Having said that, I counted the number of times I used the word in the last thirteen sentences:  ELEVEN.  

It's like the old Russian proverb:  "Don't criticize the mirror if you have a crooked face."

So, there’s that.