Biscuits, Gravy, and Other Sentence Fragments

Daddy and me in 1972.

They looked at me with a collective, ghastly disbelief. I’d just written a paragraph on the whiteboard that took an unconventional approach to sentence structure. A leader from one of my tenth-grade English classes spoke up.

“You can’t begin a sentence with ‘and,’” she said. “It breaks all the rules.”

“You’re exactly right,” I replied. “We’ll talk a lot about that this year, but the thing is, a good writer knows when he can get by with breaking the rules for the sake of good storytelling. But yes, to break the rules, you must know them first.”

It all reminded me of a vague connection I shared with my dad — one I didn’t even realize until years after he left us. Here’s an excerpt from

The King of Highbanks Road — a snippet from a chapter titled “Biscuits & Gravy” where I shared the revelation:

It wasn’t a soulful love for the land, some proud aristocratic family lineage, or even a good income that drew my father to farming. It was, rather, chasing the thing he pursued most in life: No rules.

For Watkins men, it is the thing we chase most. It’s also our arch enemy. Sooner or later, freedom unchecked will drag a man through hell.

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