I was born on April 27, 1969, roughly three months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. This is the closest I have ever come to being part of history, and I spent it in a crib, unaware, demanding a bottle. The whole world was looking up. I was looking for lunch. My priorities have not changed as much as my mother hoped.
Nobody consulted me about the arrangements. I did not choose my family, my state, or my name, which turned out to be James Walton Carns Jr., a name with a suffix. A suffix is a small legal notice that somebody else got there first. You spend the rest of your life being compared to the original model and occasionally recalled.
I grew up in Alabama among people who believed in work, reputation, and appearing to know where they were going. Whether anyone actually knew where they were going was not discussed. There was affection in our house, though it frequently arrived dressed as advice. Adults had opinions on nearly everything, including posture, haircuts, and the moral character of people who did not return casserole dishes. Children were expected to develop good manners before they developed counterarguments.
I developed both. Unfortunately, I developed them in the wrong order.
My earliest memories do not arrive in a tidy row. They come in flashes: a screen door slapping shut, a voice calling from another room, and the very particular silence that follows a question nobody at the table wants to answer. Memory, I have found, is less like a photo album and more like a car radio on a back road. Every so often a song comes in clear. The rest of the time you get static.
What I remember most is wanting to belong. I wanted the grownups to be proud of me. I wanted to be good at something, ideally something that did not involve throwing a ball while other boys watched. I wanted to understand why certain words could warm up a room and other words could empty it in under a minute. I had no vocabulary for any of that. I just knew it was there, the way you know a dog is under the porch.
Church offered a vocabulary, or at least the starter kit. I learned that God could see everything, which struck me as comforting and also wildly inconvenient for a boy of my habits. The stories were enormous. Seas split down the middle. A shepherd boy dropped a giant with a rock. A carpenter’s son forgave people who had nailed Him to a tree. I wondered what forgiveness looked like on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody was parting anything and the kitchen still needed cleaning. I am fifty-seven now and still working on that question. The kitchen also still needs cleaning.
On Sundays I watched the adults sing with their eyes closed. Some of them looked carried away to glory. Others looked like they were mentally reviewing the grocery list. I wondered whether God graded on effort. Later I would wonder whether He minded questions.
Then there was music, which made a different kind of promise altogether.
In Alabama, music was everywhere, though nobody would have called it an education. It came out of car radios, church sanctuaries, grocery store ceilings, and open windows on summer nights. Gospel promised heaven. Country music explained in detail the trouble you would have getting there. Rock and roll suggested you take another road entirely, preferably at night, preferably loud.
I listened to all three. I was a theological moderate at the age of eight.
The first guitar I ever wanted belonged to somebody else. That was true of most things worth wanting back then. They showed up in another person’s hands, making sounds I could not explain, and I stood nearby trying to look like I was not staring. I was staring.
A guitar, I figured out, could say I am here without asking permission from the room. For a quiet boy in a family full of expectations, that was a revelation on par with the Red Sea. You did not have to win the argument at dinner. You could just go upstairs and play an E chord badly until somebody knocked on the door.
The grownups in my life were busy people with firm views and places to be. I watched them all and took notes. Children do not know adults are complicated. They find out slowly, usually at inconvenient moments, often in their forties. I wanted approval. I also wanted room to become somebody nobody had pictured. That is a hard thing to explain over pot roast.
School had its own arrangements. There were rules for walking in lines, rules for raising hands, rules for when a boy was permitted to speak. I followed enough of them to avoid becoming a permanent file in the principal’s office. The rest I treated as suggestions. This approach would later be tested by the State of Alabama, which does not recognize the suggestion category.
Music was different. Music demanded discipline without making it feel like punishment. You could play the same phrase a hundred times and still find something new on the hundred and first. Nobody could hand it to you. You had to earn it one note at a time, with sore fingertips and an audience of irritated relatives. I liked that bargain.
At night I imagined stages I had never seen and crowds who had never heard of me. In those dreams I knew every chord. The band never missed a cue. Nobody argued about volume, money, or who forgot to load the amplifier. I had not met enough musicians yet.
I wish I could go back and tell that boy a few things. Be gentler with the people who love you. Learn your phone numbers. Bring a jacket. But advice travels poorly backward through time, and he would only mistake me for another adult with opinions. He would be right.
So let him stay there for now, a boy in Alabama with a borrowed dream and no calluses, certain there is a bigger world past the screen door. He has not broken anybody’s heart yet, including his own. He has time. And somewhere is the first note.
The first verse I ever memorized, and the one I have broken most creatively since:
“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.”
Psalm 119:11 (KJV)
— JC
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