Breakfast at Old Tyme

I'd sell some of you into hard labor for lox and bagel at Old Tyme with a conversation with Irv over the counter one last time. He'd come around and fill my coffee sometimes, but most of the time, he manned the register and talked to me over the glass case filled with cheesecakes and eclairs. While doctors and lawyers, and professors, and old gay men made up most of the early-morning crowd.

In those days, I would buy a Clarion Ledger going into Old Tyme, and read all the signatures. I had a trick for folding the newspaper that alleviated some of my dyslexia so I could read and try to understand what was happening around me. Uncle Tom sold the paper a few years before, and the new editorial staff changed the entire outlook of the paper. It was more literary, more educated, and more liberal. I traded knowing everybody who wrote for the paper with liking everybody who wrote for the paper and never looked back.

My nights were rarely alone but rarely with the same person from one week to the next. When someone did catch me on the repeat cycle it was usually because some aspect of their life had gone to shit and they weaponized the "les dames" part of "dieu et les dames," but breakfast, breakfast was when I connected my head into the community.

At six-thirty, I met my father and grandfather to open the mail. Coffee for twenty minutes, then breakfast at Old Tyme. Lox and Bagel. Jewish food, the Jewish experience in Jackson, was centered at Old Tyme.

In many ways, the American Jewish experience defines the second half of the twentieth century. The Jewish experience in Jackson was hardly My Favorite Year or The Education of Duddy Kravitz. Jews here could get bombed out for speaking their minds. Living here, there was always a road back to Kristallnacht; only half these rednecks couldn't identify a jew on sight, so they'd have to reference each other on who to hate.

On my street, the Jews and the Arabs lived next to each other in peace. The Freemans and the Meena's and the Crystals spoke and attended standing cocktail parties together, and there never was a conflict, while down Ridgewood road, some good ole rednecks planted a bomb in Rabi Nussbaum's office. I was a kid then, but it doesn't matter because I remembered, and nobody ever let us forget. Living in Jackson, any one of us could become a monster. That was the lesson. It's still that way. Different reasons, same monster.

Old Tyme was gentile. It was neutral politically, but everyone was left of center. We just didn't discuss it much. The educated were always left of center, and at Old Tyme, nearly everyone was working on a book. A book that usually came from Lemuria, which was in the same shopping center before they moved across the interstate. They served slices of tomato with the lox and bagel. Fresh, ripe, Mississippi tomato with the red onions and capers, and lox imported from New York.

There were other places that served breakfast in those days. Governor Waller ate breakfast most days at the Mayflower, then again for lunch. Primos number two had a very regular Belhaven breakfast clan. Sometimes daddy and I ate with them on Saturdays. Lefleur's had breakfast. When Sonny Montgomery came to Jackson, he'd stay at the Jacksonian and eat at Lefleur's. Sometimes daddy would have a breakfast meeting with him there. A few of those times, I was invited along as sort of daddy's attache but also his protege. He would have been better off taking my sister. She was much more likable and much more interested in that trajectory of life. I wanted to do absurd things like make movies or write about nothing.  The eggs were good, though, and knowing Sonny Montgomery was a pleasure.

Due to poor design choices, Old Tyme ended up windowless. Once inside, you had to focus on your book or your paper or your food, or, god forbid, you come with a friend, which almost nobody did. It probably would have made more sense for me to find a place closer to my office in West Jackson, but there wasn't anywhere that great, and Northside Drive was a direct route to Industrial Drive; you just had to drive through a growing spot of urban decay before you got there.

Lunch was usually at the Office cafeteria. When I was little, the cafeteria food was fantastic, but as Annie Ruth retired and women who worked under her retired, we ended up with cooks who weren't nearly as talented, and food costs started going through the roof, so quality suffered.

Many lunches would find me at the Zoo with a hot dog and fries. The Zoo was my special place. I wasn't Boyd Campbell II there, I was just Boyd, and even the animals knew me. It's a strange feeling when an elephant recognizes you and walks toward you, and turns her head so you can make eye contact. If only she should talk. Marre would reach out her trunk, and I would reach out my hand. We couldn't touch, but we could almost, and contact was made. You're my friend, my old friend, and I miss you when I'm not here. I wish you could speak.

Old Tyme was a terrible place to take a date. There was no bar and even fewer pretensions, and the servings were enormous. There was a girl from Memphis who was miserable in Memphis and miserable everywhere else, too, and would visit me because I'd spend all weekend trying to make her less miserable, and she loved the food at Old Tyme and Mayflower. Her, I could take to Old Tyme. She was blonde and bright-eyed and didn't read and hated my movies, and was everything I said I didn't want in a girl, but she had all of my attention, and making her smile, even knowing it wouldn't last, was all I thought about. Not many women could finish an open-face Reuben sandwich with potato salad and a pickle, but she could.

Irv wanted to retire, so he brought in a guy I knew from Creative Crafts and Hobbies across the street to run the store, but it crashed and burned, and he ended up with a fifteen thousand dollar phone bill and back taxes, so Irv went back to work himself. For a while. Not a very long while, though. He shut the place down and sold off the cases and settled the debts, and retired while he was still healthy enough to enjoy some of it, and an era ended. We have breakfast places now. Broadstreet has a very devoted crowd and really good food, but it's not the same.

Jackson never got another Jewish restaurant. Nobody ever talks about Greek restaurants, run by actual greeks, or Italian restaurants, run by actual Italians. Chinese restaurants and Thai restaurants, and Sushi restaurants are all run by Viet Namese immigrants, but nobody has a Viet Namese restaurant, which is actually excellent food. We have lots of cuisines but no cultures.

I miss Jackson the way it was. Obviously, we made mistakes because look at where we are now, but in those days, breakfast at Old Tyme, Lunch at the Zoo, and tickets to the symphony at night with some raven-haired creature I was afraid to even speak to made me feel like the world was on the way up and there would only be good things in the future. It didn't work out that way. There were much more than just good things in the future. The future held decay and pain and loss unimaginable. Maybe I miss the days when I didn't know that. Maybe I miss the optimism of youth, but I'm pretty sure it's the Lox. And Irv. I miss Irv.