Inside today’s Luverne Journal is our 2009 Profile edition, something that I hope you will read not only with interest, but with great pleasure.

How blessed we are to live in such a county as ours, one that is filled from one end to the other with amazing people. This year’s theme, “Profile,” focuses directly on these people’s lives. While some profiles may just scratch the surface of what we see every day, other stories give a more in-depth picture of the individual. In each case, we get a broader picture of the conglomerate that is Crenshaw County.

When I met Mr. C.J. Faulk at Highland Home School to take his photos with the F-16 fighter jet and his brother Clarence’s dog tag, we, of course, had to talk and visit long after the interview was over.

I told him that after I found out a taxi driver from Greenville had carried his uncle home to deliver Clarence’s death notice to the family, I was shocked. I knew that in 1944 the only person to have the State Cab Company in Greenville was my grandfather, Jim Grayson. Now, my great-uncle, Arthur Newton, also drove a taxi as well. I had already figured out that it was not my father who had made the somber drive to Highland Home because he was already in the Navy in World War II at that particular time.

When I asked Mr. C. J. about the taxi driver, he said he remembered the name: Jim Grayson. I couldn’t help but shed a tear at the thought of how our lives had been touched so profoundly by our very own relatives way before I was born, and when he was only nine years old. It’s still amazing to me how life works sometimes. We never know how our paths will cross in this life, and how we cannot, ultimately, tell our life’s story without including other’s life stories.

When Mr. Hugh Bagents talked about his being in the hog business at one time, I told him how my grandfather, Hollie Sexton, also had hogs for several years. DaddyHollie, as we grandkids called him, had a monstrous boar named Sam and his sow lady friend named Lucy. I’ll never forget the day my brother Lamar got the tail end of his pants torn up by Sam’s tusks as he was trying to hightail it over the fence to get away from him. For some reason, Sam had decided that Lamar needed to leave. Now, DaddyHollie could whack Sam in the head with a feed bucket and go on about his business. Even though I was a young child, these images are still with me—they may not seem like much to others, but they are an important slice of my childhood that was woven into the fiber of my being to help make me who I am today.

And so we have the real reason behind today’s Profile edition—a slice of these special people’s lives. Just a glimpse, just a peek, into who they really are.

The next time you talk with someone, anyone, look closely at that person’s face. What has he or she really experienced in life? What failures? What successes? What hopes and dreams were fulfilled and what didn’t pan out?

And, so it is with each and every one of us.