Away back in the early spring of 1929, I was playing with my baby brother on the grass behind our house on Wheeler Street, in Cadillac, Michigan.  I had just become three years old and little James Edward Barrons had just become two.  My mom had asked our three older sisters watch over us but they – with Alta Marie Barrons at 9, Betty Jane Barrons at 7 and Helen May Barrons at 6 – were more interested to watch some men putting big concrete sewer pipes in trenches close by us.
Old folks supposedly have poor memories of past events but because I stretch my imagination daily with writing novels, at the grand old age of eighty nine, I can clearly remember that day and much else although I was only three.
Jimmie and I were beside a creek that ran behind our house.  I was standing and he was sitting on the creek bank as a small plane flew low and right toward us.  Maybe Jimmie had never seen a plane before but I, as the big brother, had.  As the plane flew over our heads, Jimmie watched it intently and went over backwards, head over heels down into the the cool waters of the creek.
I yelled for my sisters to come and get him out but they got a workman to come over.  I can still see him vividly with his black rubber hip boots on.  He waded out and down the creek a ways and brought my little brother out.  He laid him face down on a big concrete pipe section and tried to pump the water out of him.  But Jimmy did not revive.
He was in a casket the next day in our living room.  My mom woke me up and she noticed that I had wet my bed.  She took me by the hand over to the casket.  She had me feel Jimmie’s pants.  He was dry.  “See?” I can still hear my remarkable mother saying, “Jimmie doesn’t wet his bed and neither should you.”  And in the last eighty six long years, William Jay Barrons has still not wet his bed.