Dark Clouds Sunday Night

We tell ourselves that we're significant and important, but the clouds roll over us without noticing any of this.  Sometimes they send down fingers of God that destroy our homes and our fields, but they mean no offense; they're settling some argument among themselves and just don't notice the industry of the less-than ants below them.  

Dozens dead in the delta.  Homes and crops destroyed, lives ended, and the gaseous giants roll on over us without a word.  They can't see us.  They can't conceive of us.  They can sure kill us, though.  At any moment, they can send down a spinning finger of death and take everything, then return to the sky unaffected.  

Our place in the universe is a lie we tell ourselves because we need to feel important.  How many thousands of years did it take before we could even touch the clouds, and now, now that we can touch them, now that we can use our satellites to track their every move, we still can't do anything, not even a tiny bit to control them.  They give us life-providing water or not.  They send down tornados or hurricanes or lightning storms that kill us and destroy what we make or not.  Either way, we have no impact on what they do.  

We push many tons of carbon into the atmosphere so we're not inconvenienced in travel, carbon that would kill us straight away but only seems to make the clouds more active in their normal activities.  More floods, more droughts, more tornados, more hurricanes, and in return, we get bigger cars.  Doesn't seem like a very effective trade on our part.

The clouds pass over me.  Blotting out the sun.  Sending bolts of unimaginable electrical power between them, occasionally down to earth to destroy some massive tree on earth with me.  It's hardly the first time something incredibly powerful didn't acknowledge my existence.  I acknowledge theirs, though.  I paint them, I draw them, I write about them, and I make colorful lights to imitate their effect on the land.  I am in awe of their vast power and capricious nature, so much greater than anything we ants have ever created.  

I was going to be light and joyous and carefree this weekend, but my gaseous overlords chose to put on a display that soured my mood, storms then sunlight that blistered my ears but not my crown, then storms again to make me think twice about driving to town for church.  

Bottled water they need.  Everything in the past few years seems to depend on bottled water.  A few million pounds of plastic that won't bio-degrade should help things.  It doesn't matter to the clouds; they'll just roll over mountains of plastic like they roll over us.  Nothing we do impresses them.  I hear them speak now.  Words like I heard my father say in my crib before I knew what words mean.  They're not talking to me, I know.  Talking to each other, I suppose, I wonder what they're saying.  We call them non-sentient with the vain idea that only creatures like us have thought.  I doubt that's true.  All things have thought.  Thought creates reality and the reality is that I'll write about the clouds, but the clouds will never write about me.

Doubt and Success

I love writing about feelings.  I hate having them.  Fear, doubt, guilt, pain, more guilt, I can wax large about these all day, when I have them though--when I have them, it's like a swollen boil somewhere uncomfortable and impractical and waiting to burst, but stubbornly not, frozen at that point of not bursting and relieving the stress for what seems like the foreseeable future.  

I can plan my way out of any conflict, but then time becomes a factor.  Each step has a yes-no transition that leads to the next step or to another alternative step, and I feel like giving up before every decision, but I don't because the only way to relieve the pressure is to move on.  Failure, pain, suffering, and embarrassment are always an option but not a preference.  

Challenges build character.  Working through them makes you stronger, but does it really?  Failure makes you feel weaker even if you gain knowledge, smarter, but weaker; life's energy spent on a path that led nowhere.  I hate this feeling.

Life is a series of transitions.  The cogs turn, and the clock ticks, and you move from one state to another, or you fail and fall back on the previous state, but with less optimism and less hope for the future--all of it is up in the air until it is the past. Victory or failure, you move on because the past is falling away under your feet, and the future is the only option.   The future can turn in any direction, and that is why we suffer such crushing doubt; although we pretend we don't, it's always there.   

It's waiting for me now.  Prove yourself, little man.  Pass or fail; it's your turn.  I hate this.

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.

Steve Azar - "One Mississippi" (Official State Song of MS) Cameo Version