* Name: Charles Hardin Holley aka Buddy Holly (1936–1959)

  * Born and raised in Lubbock, Texas (in the same neighborhood as me!)

  * Attended J. T. Hutchinson Middle School (just like me!)

  * Best Songs: “Not Fade Away,” “Rave On,” “Oh Boy!,” “Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “You’re So Square (Baby, I Don’t Care)”

  She was always drawing or writing in it, and when she saw an interesting article or photo in a newspaper or a magazine, she would cut it out and paste it in her scratchbook, too. When she filled all its pages, her mother bought her a new scratchbook. And then another. Opal would go through two or three of them a year. All her old scratchbooks were stored on a bookshelf in her bedroom. She had over a dozen of them now. Her current scratchbook was usually in her backpack, when it wasn’t tucked under her arm or open in front of her.

  When Opal was writing or drawing in her scratchbook, her mama referred to it as “scratchin’,” and whenever she walked in and saw her daughter scratchin’ away in her scratchbook it never failed to make her smile. Once in a while she would ask for Opal’s permission to look through some of her old scratchbooks, and when Opal said yes (as she always did), her mama would sit down on the edge of her bed and spend hours looking through them, oohing and aahing and laughing and crying and sharing stories about the past inspired by all the hidden treasures found in their wrinkled pages.

  Opal felt a special kinship with her mama, because she had a mile-wide weird streak running through her, too. They were like two weird little peas in a pod, and they always had been. They gave each other weird short haircuts, and they both wore weird vintage clothing they found in weird local thrift stores.

  Most of the straitlaced folks in Lubbock didn’t seem to know what to make of them. The general opinion among her peers at school had always seemed to be that Opal and her mama both looked weird, dressed weird, acted weird, talked weird, and were weird, and that just plain weirded people out. But that was just as fine as frog hair with Opal, and with her mama, too. They both agreed that being weird was way more fun and interesting than being average, normal, and as boring as bathwater.

  Opal tried to follow her mama’s example and embrace her weirdness, because she knew she really didn’t have much choice. Being an oddball was in her blood, just as much as her love of music was. She issued from a long and distinguished line of weirdos and melomaniacs, on both sides of her family tree.

  Opal’s daddy was named Fred D Flats, but everyone called him Freddy, and if the stories I’ve heard about him are to be believed, Freddy Flats was a fairly weird fella, too. For starters, he had an uncanny ability to memorize song lyrics. He only needed to hear them once. Legend had it that by the time he graduated high school, he was able to recite the lyrics to hundreds of different songs. His friends used to play a game where they would spin the radio dial to try and find a song that would stump him, but somehow he always seemed to know the words to everything on every station.

  Another weird thing about Fred D Flats was that his middle initial didn’t stand for anything. His entire middle name was just the letter D, as in the musical note. As part of some silly long-standing family joke, everyone born into the Flats clan, including Opal, was given one of the first seven letters of the alphabet as their middle name, so it would sound like a musical note when folks said it aloud along with their surname. Her great-granddaddy was named Major F Flats III. Her granddaddy was Filo G Flats. Her daddy was Frederick D Flats. His little brother, her uncle, was Roscoe E Flats. And she was Opal B Flats.

  Folks rarely found the musical-note-for-a-middle-name joke funny, even after Opal explained it. She thought it probably would’ve worked better with her mother’s maiden name, which happened to be Sharp. But Opal liked being a Flats, and she didn’t mind having a note for a middle name. It was a little reminder that she’d inherited her melomania from both sides of her family. The Sharps and the Flats.

  Opal never even would’ve been born if it weren’t for her parents’ shared love of music. They met at a big music festival over in Dripping Springs. According to her mama, Waylon Jennings was up on the stage singing a song he wrote with Willie Nelson called “Good Hearted Woman” when her parents spotted each other in the crowd and locked eyes. It was love at first sight for both of them. Fred Flats and Geraldine Sharp got hitched about a month later, and Opal was born about a year after that.

  Unfortunately, Opal’s daddy died a few months before she was born, so she never even got to meet him. He got drafted and died in the Vietnam War. When Opal asked her mama why they made him go over there to fight people he didn’t even know, she said there was no point trying to make sense out of it, because nobody dying in any war had ever made a lick of sense. She said there were always other ways of resolving a dispute without resorting to killing folks.

  Opal’s mama had lost her own daddy in a war, too, in Korea. So Grandma Sharp had had to raise her daughter on her own, just like Opal’s mama was now having to raise Opal on her own. Sometimes Opal wondered if that was just a cruel coincidence or the beginnings of some kind of family curse.

  Grandma Sharp passed away when Opal was in kindergarten, so Opal could still remember her a little bit. Her first name was Eunice. Opal couldn’t remember her other grandma at all. That was the one she was named after, her daddy’s mama, Grandma Opal. She passed away before Opal was born, too, when her daddy was still in high school.

  Opal’s mama used to tell her that she’d inherited traits from both sides of her family. When Opal would ask which ones, her mama would always say the same thing.

  “The Flats were weird and wistful and willful, and the Sharps were welcoming, wise, and a little weird, too,” she would say. “And you, my sweet little girl, take after them both, in equal measure.”

  Opal was extremely proud of her ancestry and did her best to live up to it.

  In first grade, Opal’s eye doctor told her that she had an astigmatism and would need to start wearing corrective lenses to compensate for it. Then, he promised, she would be able to see writing on the chalkboard at school without having to squint all the time.

  Opal hated the idea of wearing glasses at first, because she knew the other kids would start calling her “four-eyes.” But then her mama told her she could get a pair of glasses just like the ones Buddy Holly wore. Suddenly, she was over the moon!

  They had frames just like Buddy’s for sale at the glasses store over at the mall, but the mean old saleslady behind the counter told her they were meant for boys to wear and that they would look awful on a girl. But they didn’t! Opal looked at her reflection in the mirror, and she thought they made her look just like Buddy. And no one had ever looked cooler than him, except for maybe Elvis Presley or James Brown. Thankfully, her mama completely ignored the mean old saleslady and bought the Buddy Holly horn-rims for Opal anyway. She spent the whole ride home admiring them in the rearview mirror.

  Of course, when she wore them to school the next day, it was open season. Everyone started calling her “Four-Eyed Flats.” But Opal didn’t care, because she knew how cool she looked in her horn-rims. And several of her teachers confirmed it when they told her she looked “just like Buddy Holly” in her groovy new spectacles. After that, when someone called her four-eyes, she just felt bad for them, because it meant the poor ignorant soul didn’t know enough about music or style to recognize how ridiculously cool she looked. Which, in her humble opinion, was deeply uncool.

  She got used to being ridiculed and ostracized at school, just like she’d gotten used to the dust storms and the depressing landscape. In Opal’s experience, you could get used to just about anything, as long as you had plenty of good music to listen to, and someone you loved to listen to it with. Opal had both of those things, so she considered herself blessed.

  For the most part, Opal’s life up there in Level Land was calm and uneventful. But it did occasionally contain an element of danger. Because the endlessly flat landscape around Opal’s hometown didn’t just make the place look ugly. It also made it windy. And I mean crazy windy. Out of nowhere, these horrendous windstorms would suddenly roll in over the horizon and descend over the whole town, forcing everyone to seek shelter indoors. Sometimes the wind would be strong enough to blow Opal right off her feet, and she’d have to grab on to the nearest light pole or handrail and hold on for dear life until the storm subsided, to avoid getting blown away like a tumbleweed.

  Then one day, just a few weeks after she turned thirteen, a different kind of storm rolled into Opal’s life that blew so strong she lost her grip. And she did get blown away like a tumbleweed, all the way out of her home and her life and everything she’d ever known up there in Level Land.

  GOING UP TO THE SPIRIT IN THE SKY

  Opal knew something was wrong when she got home from school that afternoon and she didn’t see her mama’s car in the driveway. Uncle Roscoe’s old red Rambler station wagon was parked there instead. He lived halfway across the state, way down in the Hill Country, and was usually able to visit them only a few times a year, usually around the holidays. But it wasn’t a holiday. It was just a random Monday in late May. Opal still had nine more days of school left before she finished the seventh grade and started summer vacation.

  As Opal continued walking toward the house, she spotted her uncle sitting on the steps leading up to the front porch. He was hunched over with his face in his hands, so he didn’t spot Opal right away. But she knew who it was before she even saw his face, because he was wearing the same faded denim overalls he always wore. And he also had on his battered old white cowboy hat, which had a little square computer circuit board attached to its band in the front. Her uncle had added that personal touch after he inherited the hat from his daddy.

  Uncle Roscoe finally looked up when he heard her approaching footsteps, and that was when she saw that he’d been crying. He’d taken off his glasses to wipe away his tears, and he quickly put them back on. They were round with wire frames, like the ones John Lennon used to wear, and their thick lenses magnified his pupils, making them appear much larger than they actually were.

  “Hey, Opal,” he said, once he found his voice. He took off his hat and tried to give her a smile, but his mouth refused to cooperate and he just ended up tightly pursing his lips. Opal didn’t even have to ask him what was wrong. She could already tell by the look on his face that something bad must’ve happened to her mama.

  She slid her backpack off and gently set it down on the ground. Then she took a seat on the steps beside him and waited.

  Her uncle sat there in silence for a moment, struggling to find words. Then he took something out of his jacket pocket and held it out to her. It was an Atari cartridge with a bright red label that had the word MEGAMANIA printed on it. Opal took it with both hands and whispered thank you.

  Uncle Roscoe was the one who had given Opal her Atari 2600 game console, as a gift for her ninth birthday. And ever since then, whenever he came up to visit them for any reason, he would always bring along a new Atari game for Opal, and then the two of them would usually stay up way too late playing it together. This was the first time she wasn’t excited about receiving a new game from him, because she was so worried about why he was there.

  She put the game into her own jacket pocket and waited.

  Uncle Roscoe cleared his throat. Then, as gently as he could, he explained that her mama had suffered a stroke caused by a blood clot in her brain. She’d collapsed earlier that morning at the tailor shop where she worked, and they’d rushed her to the hospital in an ambulance. The hospital called Uncle Roscoe because he was the person listed as her emergency contact, and he’d just spent the last five hours driving up to Lubbock as fast as he could, so he could be there waiting for Opal when she got home from school and they could go to the hospital together. He told Opal he didn’t want her to hear the bad news about her mama from anyone else, and he also didn’t want Opal to be alone or with strangers when she went in to see her.

  Opal was extremely grateful to her uncle for all of this, but she was in such a state of shock she wasn’t sure if she ever managed to say so out loud. She only remembered clutching his hand in silence during the long drive to the hospital. She also remembered hearing him promise to stick around and take care of her until her mama got better.

  But her mama wasn’t going to get any better. The doctors said there wasn’t anything they could do to help her and that she probably didn’t have much longer to live. Opal refused to believe them. She sat up with her mama all that night, but she never regained consciousness, and she passed away quietly the following morning while Opal was holding her hand.

  When she realized that her mama had stopped breathing, Opal felt the most painful feeling she’d ever felt. A piercing hollowness that cored out her heart and her chest and her limbs and left her feeling empty all the way through.

  I know this part of the story is terribly sad, and that now you’re probably feeling awful for Opal, because I am, too, just thinking back on it. That was one of the worst moments of her entire life. And the next few days weren’t going to be any picnic, either. But once Opal made it through them, her luck would change for the better, and her weird and wondrous destiny would begin to reveal itself. Just wait and see.…

  In the days and nights that followed, Opal realized that Uncle Roscoe had done her one of the biggest kindnesses of her life by giving her that copy of MegaMania the night before her mama passed. Because she spent nearly every waking moment of the next few mostly sleepless days playing it, while listening to Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits over and over again on her boom box. This kept her brain and her hands completely occupied, and that was enough to keep her from slipping down any further into the depths of despair.

  But unfortunately she couldn’t play MegaMania nonstop. Her uncle kept dragging her out of the house, to go cry her eyes out for a few hours in some church or cemetery while they attended her mama’s memorial, funeral, and subsequent burial. Those were a couple of the hardest days Opal ever had to live through.

  Her mama’s funeral wasn’t a big affair. Her friends from work all came to pay their respects, and a bunch of her regular customers did, too. They were all wearing colorful patchwork clothing that she’d made for them. And so were Opal and Uncle Roscoe. She was dressed in her turquoise tuxedo, and he was wearing his gemstone jean jacket her mama had given him the previous Christmas, even though he said it made him feel ridiculous.

  When the pastor opened up the floor, a bunch of people went up to the lectern one after the other to say a few words about her mama, about how much joy and kindness and beauty she and her clothing had brought into their lives, and how badly they were going to miss her. It was heartbreaking for Opal to hear these things, because each one of them seemed to make her miss her mama even more, but she was still grateful to have heard them.

  Her uncle walked up there and tried to say a few words, too, but he was too choked up to get any out. He was able to manage only a few strangled sobs, while he stood there with his gemstone jean jacket glittering under the lights. Finally he just laid his right hand on her mama’s casket for a moment and then sat back down next to Opal without saying anything. Opal still gave him a big hug anyway for trying.

  Opal knew she probably wouldn’t be able to get any words out, either, if she went up there and tried to talk about her mother. Thankfully she’d planned ahead. She’d brought along the boom box her mama had given her for her thirteenth birthday a few weeks earlier. She carried it up and set it on the lectern, then pressed play on the tape she’d made earlier that morning. It had only one song on it, recorded over and over again on both sides of the cassette. It was the song her mama had always told her she wanted to be played at her funeral someday: “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum. Her mama always used to sing along with the lyrics whenever it came on the radio, and Opal would always chime in and echo her, singing the backup vocals in a high-pitched falsetto.

  Her mama especially loved the part that went: “When I die and they lay me to rest, gonna go to the place that’s the best.”

  That line always made her mama happy for some reason, and she would belt it out at the top of her lungs.

  When the song was over, Opal just let the tape roll, and in a few seconds the song started over again from the beginning. Opal let it continue to play over and over again on a continuous loop for the rest of the ceremony.

  They buried Opal’s mama right alongside her daddy and all four of her grandparents in the Lubbock cemetery. Buddy Holly was buried there, too, just a stone’s throw away, so Opal knew her mama was being laid to rest in good company. That didn’t make her miss her mama any less, though.

  Opal and Uncle Roscoe were the last two people to leave her mama’s grave. After everyone else was gone, they both just stood there staring down at their family members’ side-by-side tombstones. Both of Opal’s parents, and all four of their parents, too. All the Flats and Sharps were lined up in a row there in front of them, like keys on a piano.

  Her mama’s daddy had been buried here first. After her mama had Opal’s daddy buried next to him, Grandpa Filo had arranged for he and his wife’s ashes to be interred here, too, so that they could be laid to rest alongside their son. Now her mama was buried alongside him, too.