Ben J. Cox

A Winding Road: a Book of Poems Ben J. Cox

The author grew up in Arkansas. He spent his first nine years living beside a dirt road in Waldron; the next eight years at an orphanage in Monticello. During the Vietnam War years, he completed a four year stint in the US Navy. Part of his tour was the Naval Communications Station on Guam, MI, a small island in the south Pacific, a US territory. The remainder of his tour was in California and Texas. The author's first real job came when a man in Arkansas, instead of hiring him, handed him a business card and challenged him to drive 300 miles to Dallas, Texas. There, he was hired on the spot by a man who later would ask him to move to Oklahoma, where he has lived since the fall of 1968. When the author graduated from Tulsa University a member of the EE National Honor Society, Etta Kappa Nu in 1977, it appeared that he had done very well, and he had. But, his time in college didn't begin with a bang. His counselor explained that he would not need to take the college entrance exam; that he was over twenty-five years old. "But, you will need to take an English test," she explained. Afterward, when the author failed the English test, she could have said, "Well, you don't appear to be University of Tulsa material!" But she didn't. Instead, she picked up a flyer lying on her desk. "Why don't you go ahead and enroll and take this writing class." Sometime later, the instructor gave the class an assignment. "Write me a half-page, single-spaced article about something original," he said. That night the author labored over what to write and finally settled on a short story he titled, "The Greatest Work of Art". It described the creation of man from the author's point of view. A couple of days later, the instructor gave the papers back to the students. Across the top of the author's paper was written, A Very Good! The author lost the paper in one of his many moves, but later resurrected the story in a poem; the title, you guessed it, "The Greates