Man on Fire

[LiberalArkie]

http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/story-of-reverend-charles-moore?fullpage=1

?itok=N7n1bLIV

FOR HIS ENTIRE LIFE, CHARLES MOORE SOUGHT TO HEED GOD’S CALL TO CHANGE A BROKEN WORLD—FIGHTING PASSIONATELY FOR CIVIL RIGHTS, HELPING THE POOR, AND FEEDING THE HUNGRY. UNTIL ONE DAY, IN A DESOLATE PARKING LOT IN GRAND SALINE, HE DECIDED HE HADN’T DONE ENOUGH.

The strip-center parking lot where the Reverend Charles Moore chose to end his life is as large as a football field and as lonely as prairie, the cracked gray asphalt dotted with weeds, shards of glass, and crushed Copenhagen cans. The faded yellow paint on the pavement recalls other days, when the Dollar General here was a Piggly Wiggly and members of the Night Prowlers, a teenage car club, would come park their hot rods and open the hoods. Residents of Grand Saline (population 3,136) know the lot as the Bear Grounds, and on Friday and Saturday nights, high school kids still gather to hang out and play music on their truck radios. (“Bear,” as any of them can tell you, was the nickname of Wayne Clark, a car buff who used to park his ’55 Chevy here and watch the world go by on U.S. 80.) When the kids get bored, they pile into their trucks and “take the loop”—pull out onto the highway, drive to the west end of town, cruise through the Sonic, then drive back, past the Salt Palace and the Salt City Inn. It doesn’t take long to complete this ritual circle of small-town life. On any given Friday night, as many as two dozen kids may meet at the Bear Grounds.

But on the morning of Monday, June 23, the parking lot was almost empty. Angi McPherson, a receptionist at Sophistikutz, a hair and tanning salon next to the Dollar General, got to work at eleven and noticed an elderly man standing some 150 feet away from the storefront. Dressed in khakis and a pale-blue shirt, with thinning white hair and tortoise-shell glasses, he didn’t exactly look out of place. He could have been one of the many locals going to pick up a prescription at Economy Drug or a cane at BT Medical Supplies, a few doors down.

Except that he wasn’t going anywhere. Monday is a slow day at Sophistikutz, and as morning turned to afternoon, McPherson found herself watching the man. Other shoppers came and went, but he stood by his car, a Volkswagen hatchback, leaning against it with his ankles crossed, looking toward the road. Occasionally he would walk over to a storage crate that the Dollar General was using as it remodeled its store, and he’d lean against that for a while. It was a hot, windless afternoon that only got hotter; still, the man stayed out there.



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