Beginning

Brenda was born in Shelby hospital on May 1st 1940. Maybe Heywood Thompson was the doctor. A cranky little man (whom my mother once berated for giving me sulfa medicine when he knew I was allergic to it) he was the doctor to many of us.

Brenda's first memories were memories of what she had been told by adults.

She was told that as a toddler she liked to dance and would "dance her diidee off". To my knowledge she never danced after that - no, that is wrong, she danced with her father when she was an adolescent. I only know that I never saw her dance or danced with her except for a few self-conscious forays across the kitchen floor.

(But when the music got down and dirty she could not stop herself from tapping her feet and moving her body in small imperceptible ways. The first time I saw that was when we were in the red Corvair coupe - which would later become "Little Lulu" - coming back from our honeymoon in Charleston. Ray Charles was singing something. Brenda smiled a little and moved in almost imperceptible but sexy ways.)

She loved the TV show "Dancing with the Stars" and was pleased that she lived long enough to see who won last year's season.

She also liked cigarettes even when she was little and had to be stopped from picking up butts off the sidewalk and putting them in her mouth. She called cigarettes "her friends".