Barefoot Missouri Days (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780996515399)

Filled with Americana that is folksy, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Barefoot Missouri Days is filled with a sense of wonder and a wry wit as Baylis Glascock explains his bafflement with all things sexual and his equal confusion over racial, ethnic, and economic disparity, realities that he treats with sensitivity.

Filmmaker and editor, Glascock recalls, with vivid and almost cinematic clarity, the years of his childhood on the small family farm near Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived and wrote. Recounting the awe of nature, the joy of mischief, the pain of humiliation, and the strength of family bonds, Baylis brings small-town life into sharp and endearing focus.

Of his childhood and teen years in the post-World War II era of the Midwest, Baylis says it best himself: "This small farm in the center of the continent was the center of my father's world, as it had been for his father and grandfather. Land that had succored generations of my family. Land they had served, as it had served them. Clearing, planting, harvesting, fertilizing, always demanding toil. In good times, the land gave bountifully. A place to live in communion with nature. This communion, the very ground of their being. Understood deeply, but they had no words for it. As if, like the true name of God, it could not be spoken."