Trail system

There was a system of trails that wound through Levy. Rock found its epicenter near his front bedroom bed but couldn't decide whether to stick with those most familiar to him or to roam along some that might have some historic provenance.
It was a very difficult decision, and he wondered what his older walking friends would think. He imagined a scenario in which Bob McKinney walked the trails with him and loved them all. At the same time, it occurred to him that he was supposed to meet someone for a round of golf.

Alternate shot

Instead of golf balls, they were hitting nearly flat, triangular shaped, two-inch sided pieces of particle board. Their wooden clubs were no more than three feet long and weighed less than a pound each. Rock's partner in an alternate-shot format had apparently hit a roughly fifty-foot drive. Rock found the triangle stuck in the fairway, which ran through the front yard of a house in Galveston, Texas, where Rock had lived with his family as a child.
"Those things are hard to hit," Rock's teammate said.
Rock could tell from the feel of his warmup swing that he faced an impossible task. He took a full, weak swing, devoid of any force whatsoever, and the triangle traveled two feet at most.
"Wait a minute," Rock said. "I'm calling bullshit. There's no way you hit this fifty feet."

The near or far past

There had been a robbery at a minimart near the Aikman's house in Russellville, and Rock and his cousin Crutch stopped by for gas and a bag of ice in time to witness its aftermath. Rock was surprised to see that the state trooper on the scene was an old high school friend named Ben Hawkins.
Rock talked with Ben about a college football game everyone watched the night before, and then he and Crutch walked across the minimart lot, turned behind the store, and cut through the Aikman's backyard to the house. As they expected, everyone was there — Aunt Jean, Uncle Jim, Uncle Bob, Rock's mother, all the cousins, everyone.
It was as if they were somewhere between 1975 and 2005.

A big bed

In a neighborhood of freakishly large beds, Rock found the biggest. He and Zach, a friend from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers, were doing yard work when Zach noticed the first of the extreme beds through a random bedroom window.
"Man, check this out," Zach said.
Rock looked in to see a bed at least fifty feet deep and thirty feet wide.
"Jiminy Cricket," he said. "That's a fucking big bed."
Late in the afternoon of the next day, Rock had worked his way through toward JFK Boulevard, the main thoroughfare through the expansive Park Hill neighborhood, when he noticed an almost warehouse size extension built onto a house near the intersection of F Street and JFK. It had a large, open bay door through which Rock could see a bed the size of a basketball court.

Dinnertime

Two students from Rock's elementary school class were at his house, and both were confused by his toaster oven and the proper time to use it. Apparently, neither of them knew how to read or understood how inappropriate it was to begin meal preparation at four a.m.
One, an African-American boy perhaps eight years old, had moved the oven from Rock's kitchen to his front bedroom. The other—a short, overweight, balding middle-aged white man with Down syndrome—was in the kitchen, where he had opened a can of cat food and spooned its contents into a saucepan on the stovetop.