Personal Narrative Of King Arthur's Life

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He called it his Greenwood tree, a tall white pine that towered above his neighborhood across from the railroad tracks. The town wanted to cut it down, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said he liked to believe that it had been planted before his birth, which would have made it nearly one-hundred.
Arthur was 96, the youngest son of a former slave from South Carolina. He was the fourteenth child in his family and durning his long life he had worked as a locksmith, a tailor, a barber, an artist, a coal miner, and a Baptist minister. When I met him, Arthur was working as a gardener, a man who seemed to me to have a magical touch on the outdoors.
Each Tuesday morning at 4:30am I would wake up to his whistle outside my bedroom window. I don’t know how he saw his way around in the dark, but he would eventually break into a spiritual song. He would sing, “This is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it, for the joy of the Lord has become my strength.” He called it his work music.
He wore rubber bands around the bottom of his pant legs to keep the ticks away. On his head he wore an old leather hat which he never removed. As early as I can remember I worked at Arthur’s side. The first lesson he ever taught me was …show more content…

His clothes were often dirty. His buttons or zipper left open. He stopped brushing his teeth and grew increasingly forgetful. Once he arrived to work at 2:30 in the morning, unaware that it was the middle of the night. His edging along the border of the lawn was not long, straight and tight. Once I found him asleep, sitting against a tree. And then one day he too suffered a stroke. When we visited him in the hospital, I told Arthur that while he was sick I would keep the land in shape. As I worked, I convinced myself that Arthur would be back and how proud he would be to see what I’d done. But, he never did return. The day he died I worked outside all day long and into the evening, my mind

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