byChrisWhite – 2014

“I scarcely know where to begin, but love is always a safe place.” Emily Dickinson

Perhaps love is the only place to begin a tale like this. They say you can’t choose your family, and in some cases, that feels like a weary proverb carved into stone, unyielding and occasionally taunting. But every so often, within that tapestry of kin, you come across someone who makes you look at yourself and, for a moment, feel a spark of pride that maybe, just maybe, some of that remarkable stuff flows in your own veins.

David White was that rare, radiant kind of kin, the sort that fills you with a glimmer of ancestral privilege. David could take any fragment of life and turn it into gold. It seemed like he could do everything, and more than that, he seemed to know everything worth knowing.

David, my cousin, the first cousin, the elder of our particular line of Whites, passed on a September morning, sudden and mysterious as the weather, at the age of fifty-four. They say a heart attack, but no one yet knows for certain. But this story isn’t about how David left; it’s about how he filled every day of his life to bursting, how he charged through his world like an engine too big for the track, and how, as a boy just five years behind him, I ran to keep up, hoping a little of his light might rub off on me.

Our birthdays were just two days apart, separated by four years and three hundred sixty-three days, a shared orbit that felt like it bound us together in some cosmic way. David, just older than my sister Cindy, shared a rhythm with our lives that beat on through our family’s summers, the kind of endless summer that only exists in memory. Our parents, all busy, working people, would leave us, a gang of White children, to run wild at Mamaw and Papaw White’s house in Antioch. And there, under that old asbestos roof, with David at the helm, the ordinary was transformed into something as strange and vivid as an old family reel-to-reel.

David’s mind was a factory of ideas, constantly churning out scenes and plots for his home movies. He’d direct us in his makeshift epics, shot on his Super 8 camera with all the creative finesse of a director who had never heard of a “budget.” My brother and I became the occasional stars in these mini-spectacles, sprinting and somersaulting around his neighborhood, racing bottoms-down across the yard, hamming it up in the most absurd ways—all under David’s careful, mischievous eye. He was already wielding his camera like a conductor’s baton, drawing out the humor in every shot with special effects he conjured out of thin air.

As I grew, I became a musician, a drummer, and David, already mastering guitar, banjo, mandolin, and upright bass, welcomed me into his musical orbit. Later, when I moved out and took on the badge as a Murfreesboro police officer, I even shared a home with David, where we bonded over our shared obsessions: guitars and guns, tents and rope, and any adventure that lay waiting outside the doorstep. Every now and then, memories of those days float to the surface, pulling a quiet smile across my face, a fond reminder of a time when life held more raw laughter and fewer formalities.

David the man, how to put it? He was funny, yes, and generous, and never short on charm. His wit was as quick as a fox and twice as clever. He carried an ease about him, as though he were on a first-name basis with the world itself, and whenever he smiled, the entire room seemed to bloom under its warmth. His mind raced faster than he could keep up with, to the point he’d pause mid-sentence and solve yesterday’s problem out loud, only to dive back into today’s.

His backyard was a testament to his ingenuity, a madman’s playground of contraptions, half-built dreams, and solved problems. If there was a solution, David was already halfway through inventing it, adding just enough sarcasm along the way to make you double over laughing. I’ll never forget his mechanical scarecrow, a project both terrifying and marvelous, scaring the sense out of any critter who dared wander by. Then there was his crowning glory, the pièce de résistance: an outdoor pool with a sliding Quonset hut roof that could transform it into an indoor oasis with a single swoop. It was pure David, imaginative, over-engineered, and full of joy.

And then there were his battles with the mighty John Deere. When Deere engineers sent forth a part too flimsy for his taste, David would promptly craft his own, one sturdy enough to last a lifetime. If John Deere were iron, David White was steel. It was his way of thumbing his nose at the limits of the mundane.

The truth is, there are more stories about David than I could tell in a lifetime. Those who knew him carry a piece of him forever, inked into their memories with the kind of permanence only a truly singular person can leave behind. I suppose my tales feel a little duller now, as though David’s absence has dimmed my own light. Without him to narrate the world, it seems a bit emptier, a bit quieter.

But even so, I stand a little taller just knowing I had a cousin like David. Somewhere, in the alchemy of blood, I know there’s a sliver of that same spark. That’s the kind of DNA you don’t just inherit, you treasure it, you walk a little prouder with it stitched inside you. David Ray White, my cousin, left more than memories; he left a legacy. And in his shadow, even on the darker days, I find a little extra light to guide me forward.