The Commerce of House Finches in the Setting Sun

I sought feeling the sun on my shaved head, my shoulders dappled with the sinking sun.  A trio of house finches hold a conference, one on the pitch of the roof, two in ornamental trees.  They puff out their pink breasts and exchange places, never standing on the same branch at the same time.  The content of their tet-a-tet-a-tet I couldn't discern.  They sounded angry at times, sternly making a point.  There wasn't a female in sight.  Maybe they were rivals

Active and demanding mockingbirds move in and out of the scene.  Twice the size of my little pink pinches, Mockingbirds are the undisputed king of the Mississippi sky.  From childhood, I was told they were named so because they mimicked any bird they heard, but their song sounded pretty distinct to me.  Their staccato song sounds like a New Orleans jazz trumpet warming up.  Three short blasts, then drop a note and three more.  I'm in their territory.

For a hundred thousand years, this spot entertained these same species of birds without anything like me nearby.  For the last forty-five years, their pristine habitat has been the manicured garden of a retirement village.  It makes no difference to the birds.  These are still their skies.  Millions of years before, they were therapod dinosaurs, and people like me were squirrels hiding in their shadows.  Part of God's plan was for us to exchange places.

Sweat bees, smaller than a field pea, ravage the dandelion and the clover of its booty.  I don't think they're capable of knowing their voracious scavenging actually is a vital part of the plant's life cycle.  I don't think they care.  I'm a giant intruder in their universe, but they don't care about that, either.  All they care about is the next blossom.   Bees never ponder their place in the universe.  Sometimes I envy them.

Suffering a digestive malady, I decided to attend church electronically today.  Galloway has broadcast their Sunday services since before I was born, first by radio, then television, and now the internet.  It was a true blessing during covid.  The pastor noted how much empty lumber there was at church this morning, gesturing to the empty pews.  He blamed it on the three-day weekend.  He might have been on to something.   One of the drawbacks of having so many remote options for attending church is that the pastor and the choir can't really gauge how many people they're reaching.  Today, it was at least two more than what he could see before him--probably many more.

I attended Sunday School by Zoom.  That's such a convenience.  Five of our members attended that way, including Ed King, who is somewhat famous in Mississippi terms.  My Sunday school is somewhat of a Millsaps Mafia.  There are graduates from the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties in the class, and a solid number of professors and staff members as well.  We don't have any more recent graduates yet, but that could change at any moment.

Today we discussed free will and God's will.  To try and get a handle on the subject, we included the Theory of Special Relativity, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's cat, Christopher Hitchins, and of course, the bible.  We like to warm up the class with a brief discussion of politics since we have some of the best political minds in Mississippi in the class.  Today we discussed the dilemma of the Mississippital Hospital Association and Medicaid expansion and the moral implications of what's happening there.  I'm secretly hoping that what I write might attract younger people to our August group.  We're not your ordinary Sunday School class, but I don't think there are any ordinary people reading anything I write.

I don't know God's will, even though I study it a great deal and have for quite a while.  I'm willing to admit I'm often agnostic because I'm trying to be really painfully honest when I write.  I don't know God's will.  I certainly don't understand God's will any more than I understand Special Relativity or Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, but I understand they exist, and I understand what they address.  I understand that God's will exists, and I struggle to understand what it addresses.  With the sun on my bald head and the birds in my ears, sometimes I think I feel it.  I think we all do if we're quiet and listen.   God doesn't speak any clearer than my pink-bellied house finches, but I know they're communicating, and I know he's communicating.  I don't necessarily have to understand the message to understand it's important.

Fieldstone

In season two of Ted Lasso, Sarah Niles plays Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, a psychologist who specializes in counseling athletes.  

A good writer doesn't just pick names for a character.  Names mean something.  Although Sharon is of African descent, she has a very English name.  A fieldstone is a very specific thing.  In England, you have a lot of glacial deposits, which include igneous rocks that have had two sides worn flat by erosion and left in the soil where they're a nuisance to farmers.   After removing the stones from the field, the farmer can then plow and plant the land and make it fruitful.  The stones they remove from the field are then collected in a pile where somewhere in Britain's distant past, someone discovered that these stones with two flat sides could then be used to build the famous British walls or cobble-stone roads.  What once was a nuisance and an obstacle becomes something useful and beneficial.  In the show, that's a pretty good description of the relationship between Ted and Sharon.

Because of my Stuttering, Dyslexia, and ADHD as a child, I was given to many behavioralists for evaluation and training.  My father was a bit embarrassed by the whole process and felt like all I really needed was sports, even though he didn't have the time to participate in coaching or teaching me anything.  My mother read every possible book on child rearing and believed completely in these professionals.   To me, it felt like I was being passed from one stranger to another in uncomfortable settings, made even more uncomfortable because this combination of conditions made me really unnaturally shy and uncomfortable around people.  I'm sure the people my mother sent me to were generous and kind and wonderful, but to me, they were alien and intimidating and very interested in doing things to me that I didn't understand.  

As I entered adolescence, my oldest brother, who had been my idol, began to have pretty serious addiction issues.  When I got to the point where I had to shave every day, his condition advanced considerably, and he began to have pretty regular auditory hallucinations.  He had what you would call voices in his head.  

Immediately after that, the entire family was sent for psychological evaluation.  In Jackson in the seventies, there were really very few people doing this, and everyone suggested we use Clinical Associates at Highland Village.  Initially, I had four or five sessions with Jim Baugh, but since his son was in my class, they transferred me to Doug Draper.  Doug also had a child my age, but she went to a different school.  

I saw Doug off and on for something like forty years.  Initially, he treated me for issues of anxiety and feelings of abandonment, which expanded to panic and pretty serious depression.  Doug reported to my parents that we communicated well.  That was absolutely the truth.  Over the forty years, I spoke to him at least monthly; I always found we could and did talk about anything.  

Sometimes we would talk about me.  It was important to my parents that I develop a useful relationship with a counselor because between my father's career and my mother's career and the crisis in one brother's life and the more normal transmission of my other siblings' lives, whether they had an interest or not, nobody really had time for me.  I was the child that required the least attention, and that's what I got, which was fine by me because the only person in the family who understood the things that were important to me was either stoned out of his mind all the time or having conversations with imaginary people, so being left alone was about the best outcome I could hope for.

I grew to care a great deal about Doug Draper.  I still do.  Whatever he was like as a psychologist, he was a great intellectual mentor, and I found that valuable.  In time, I would find other people to fill that role, Catherine Fries certainly, Lance Goss, Suzanne Marrs, and probably the most important was Brent Lefavor, who taught me to use a hammer and use my mind as an artist.  

I can't say how much Doug helped me as a patient.  I can't say because I can't compare what I would have been like without him, but I can say he never cured me--if cured is even a word one should use with regard to psychology.

After my brother died and my mother died, and my wife left, I began having sessions with Doug over the phone because I refused to leave the house.  During those sessions, I covered my shoulders with a green blanket.  It's in my lap now.  The edges are frayed, and it has maybe ten cigarette holes in it.  Eventually, I quit making appointments.   Doug's secretary would call a couple times a week to see if I wanted to set up an appointment.  One day, Doug called himself.  I sank down into my chair and covered my head and face with my green blanket.  "Don't give up."  He said.  "I won't," I said, "I just want to navigate this by myself for a while."  and that was the last time I spoke with Doug Draper.

A few years before, I had an experience that made me really question the value of psychology.  

My wife and I were having trouble.  She wanted us to see a man she knew for couples counseling.  She had known him for years and been his patient for years and said she trusted him absolutely.  Her father, who I still consider something of a saint, said it couldn't hurt.  I found it much easier to talk about our problems with her father than I could with her, which is probably an indication of how poorly I was handling the situation.  So, I signed up to speak with this psychologist friend of hers.  

We had sessions together, and we had sessions individually.  During these individual sessions, I made a very sincere effort to discuss with him the things happening in the relationship that I felt were creating problems for me, things that I feared were damaging me.  It's hard to tell if a psychologist understands you because all they ever do is try to get you to talk more, which I did.

Going into the next couple's session, I felt energized and hopeful because, as much trouble as I had communicating my troubles to my wife, I had utterly unburdened myself with this counselor and believed he would facilitate her understanding of what I was going through and how this relationship was hurting me.

As the session wore on, he focused entirely on her problems with me, even putting me on the spot about what I was going to do to change.  I even said, "What about the things we talked about?" and his response was that I was going to have to work those things out on my own because what was happening to me wasn't what was important.

On the way out, I told my wife I hoped she brought her credit card because I wasn't giving that fucker another goddamn dime, that it wasn't worth a hundred and fifty bucks for my wife and her old friend to set me up like that.  Later that night, her father called me to say he was sorry, that he understood what I was going through, and it wasn't my fault.  We talked for an hour.   I could never tell if that psychologist heard any of the things I was trying to say, but I know my father-in-law did.  After the divorce, he would call every so often to check on me.  Eventually, he began to forget why he called, and then eventually, he began to forget that we weren't related anymore.  I never corrected him.  I was just glad to hear his voice.

They want me to get a new psychologist now.  There's a lot in my head to unpack, they say.  I suppose there is.  I wish I could say I had more confidence in psychology.  When someone's in a real crisis, I still find myself recommending they find someone to talk to.  In my experience, there comes a point of diminishing returns.  Somewhere along the way, I reached that.  I'm probably not being fair in my evaluation of the couples counselor I saw.  I probably would have been more upset with him if he hadn't completely taken my wife's side, so I might have put him into a no-win situation.

If the point of psychology is to lay out very honestly and completely the things that happened to you and how you feel about them and then try to make some sort of evaluation of what it all means and how to handle it better, I already do that with my scribbling.  If I'm honest, that's probably why I write.  There are things in my head that will kill me if I don't get them out somehow, and writing a few thousand words every day is the best way I know to get them out.  

I miss talking to Doug very much.  I miss talking to my father-in-law very much more.  Both were doctors.  Both tried to heal me.  I can't really say that either was able to do it, probably because I'm a fantastically bad patient.  Maybe that's not the point.  Maybe the point is not the healing but the trying, and trying gets me to hold on long enough for my body's natural systems to heal itself.  

The stones we take out of our fields become the stones we use to build walls and bridges and roads and houses in our lives.  God sends us people along the way to teach us how to do that.  Maybe that's what psychology is all about.  

Goldfish Memory

Watching this Ted Lasso thing, I'm brought to mind my worst trait, the thing that holds me back and threatens to destroy me every single time.

I don't let go of things very well.

That's not to say I don't lose.  I lose--a lot.  I've lost my homework.  I've lost arguments. I've lost jobs.  I've lost maybe a thousand pens and pencils.  I've lost the mate to most of my socks.  I've lost teeth.  I've lost ninety-five percent of my hair.  I've lost my train of thought.  I've lost my temper.  I've come very close to losing my mind.  Worst of all, I've lost entire human beings.  Some died.  Some moved away.  Some drifted away.  Some found someone else--and some, some just got really fucking fed up with the Boyd Campbell experience and asked to be let go--which I did, at least on the outside.

I lose these things, but I don't let go of them.  I retain them.  I punish myself for losing them, over and over and over.  One of the reasons I got as fat as I did was because I would consume whole pizzas because a pizza can't ever run away from me.  I can't ever lose a pizza.  I can't ever screw up and do a pizza completely wrong, or too late, or the wrong way.  Pizzas don't care about me, and if I'm honest, I don't care about them--but they're there; they're not lost.

Ted Lasso says that the happiest animal in the world is the Goldfish.  Wanna know why?  "A goldfish," he says, "only has a ten-second memory."

I've heard this before.  I don't know what sort of scientist or sociologist, or animal behavioralist came up with this bit of data.  I don't know how they tested these goldfish or what kind of grant they used to study them.  It probably came out of LSU; they study a lot of weird shit.

Ted's Point.  Ted's point is that if you don't remember your mistakes--if you forget your losses, then you're not burdened with them.  I've been given this advice before.  It makes sense.  It really does.  The thing is, I absolutely suck at it.  I remember. I remember EVERY LITTLE THING.  Sometimes I get the details mixed up because I have ADHD and can't focus sometimes, and I'm also getting old, and my brain probably doesn't function properly because I spent entire decades letting Alica Keough or Inez Birthfield or Randy Yates or Inky The Clown, in his human form fill me up with blue drinks and red drinks and brown drinks and drinks in bottles and drinks in cans and drinks in mugs, all so I can forget, which I can't actually do.  Tennessee sippin' whiskey doesn't make me forget, but it makes me not care--at least for a little while.  

Ted Lasso would just stare at me with this dumb smile on his face, waiting for the lesson to sink in.  I hate guys like that.  I just want to punch them in the face.  You wouldn't know it, but I have a new spirit animal.  His name is Roy Kent.  I have thoroughly and completely wrapped myself in this whole Southern Gentleman thing, but beneath all that is one of the angriest mother fuckers you've ever met.  Part of that is that I was born into a family with incredibly high standards, most of which I was physically incapable of ever achieving, even though my mother sacrificed most of her evenings for years trying to teach me to read.  I would tell the world to fuck off.  I would tell you to fuck off.  I would tell them to fuck off.  But I can't.  I can't let go, even that much.

Jesus.  That Jesus, the one you've heard about, delivered most of his manifesto standing on the side of a small mountain to a mass of people who came to hear him speak.  Jews, then and now, spend a great deal of time concerned about how to pray and when to pray, and what to pray about.  Jesus streamlined that entire process.  As much as Christians labor over how to deify this man from Galilee, he doesn't include himself in this prayer, but he does add this, Father, forgive us of our transgressions as we forgive those who transgress against us.  That word is translated in a lot of different ways.  Sometimes it's "trespass."  We do things; we go places we're told we ought not.  If you're Methodist, that's the one you've heard all your life.  Sometimes it's "sins"; forgive us of our sins.  That makes sense, right? 

The point is God forgives us when we fuck up.  God forgives us every single time we fuck up, no matter how much we fuck up; even if we make the same fuck up over and over, all we have to do is ask God, and we're forgiven.   Some people may question the value of having some sort of ethereal being that may or not exist to forgive us, and if he does exist, he sure isn't inclined to settle the issue.  Receiving God's forgiveness really only helps if you believe in God and if you believe in the ability of this guy Jesus to speak for God, even though not long after teaching us this lesson, he was nailed to a tree by the Romans and died straight away.  

Having God forgive you is of almost no importance at all if you cannot forgive yourself if you cannot let go of those things you lost, the transgressions you made.  Holding onto those things and burying them under your skin is what makes you Roy Kent.  Anger and frustration become your superpower, and it makes you incredibly able to do some things, but it makes it impossible to do others, and it kills you inside.  At least, it did for me.

"Ten Second Memory."  Ted Lasso is immovable.

When it became clear that I was breaking inside, clear that I was absolutely fucking miserable and wishing I were dead,  my father would put his hand on my shoulder and say, "You gotta shake this off, buddy.  You can't let this stop you."  Between football and girls and fucking up most of my school assignments, Daddy told me to shake it off quite a lot.  Part of the reason that advice never really worked on me was that I knew he didn't shake things off.  He internalized them.  All of them.  He consumed his trespasses just like I consumed mine, and one day the burden of them made his heart stop while sitting behind his desk dictating a letter to Wingate and Deaton, and Taylor about a fishing trip they never got to take.  A letter they never received.  

"Ten Second Memory, buddy.  Shake it off."  This guy is really getting on my tits.  

Lessons aren't lessons because they're easy.  Turn the other cheek.  Consider the lilies of the field.  Don't cast the first stone.   Take no thought for the morrow.  God is greater than us.  God created us.  God forgives us just because we asked.  No sacrifice, no penance; those bills are paid for us in advance.

If God forgives us, why is it so horrible trying to forgive ourselves?  

Ted Lasso and his goldfish can go fuck themselves.  Really, this is very annoying.  I get the point, though.

I'm trying to shake it off, Daddy, I really am.  I've spent forty-five years trying to shake it off.  Losing is something I'm good at, but letting go is not.  I get what you're saying, though.  I won't quit trying.  

Apologies to my Aunt for the language.  Sometimes I put a lot of pepper in the pot.

History is Lunch at Woolworths

 In 1960, a previously unknown writer out of South Alabama published a work that presaged the monumental changes that lay ahead for the American South.  It was called, To Kill a Mockingbird.  You've probably been assigned to read it at some point in your life.  If not, if you're from here or choose to live here, you should read it and read the old testament.  Anything else you read from there will have solid roots.  

There are, so far, three actor's editions of To Kill a Mockingbird.  The first is the screenplay by Horton Foote.  Foote wrote something like thirty stageplays but won an Oscar for the Adapted Screenplay he penned of Harper Lee's novel.  Rights for his script are complicated to get and not really written for the stage.

Christopher Sergel published an acting edition in 1970.  Newstage has done this version, I believe, three times.  Several of my friends were involved in these productions, and they were all brilliant.  If you've seen To Kill a Mockingbird on stage in the last fifty years, it was most likely this version.

In 2016, Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing and A Few Good Men, revived Mockingbird with a new script that holds the current title for the most successful straight play in terms of audience in the history of Broadway.  

Sorkin's script features extended scenes with Tom Robinson and especially Calpernia, trying to broaden the cultural perspective of the play so that it's more than just the white man hero that Lee's book is often criticized for.  

Today at History is Lunch, a writer discussed his book about the sit-ins at Jackson's Woolworth's lunch counter on May 28, 1963.  In four days, this will have been sixty years ago.  In twenty-three days, I will also turn sixty years old.  

I was, reportedly a very difficult pregnancy.  My mother was sent home for an entire trimester to rest because her doctor could not find a fetal heartbeat.  Having miscarried twins eleven months before I was conceived, my mother was anxious about my pregnancy.  Had it failed too, her plans were to stop trying, as carrying children for two trimesters and losing them in the third was taking a toll on her.  The riot at Woolworths on Capitol Street, where white men attacked nine protestors attempting to break the color line in Jackson, was very big news when she was at home, not knowing if I'd be born alive or dead.

I was going to attend the lecture in person, but it looked like rain, so I watched over the internet.  I knew, going in, that I would know some of the names involved.  

The first was Allen C Thompson.  Thompson served as Jackson's Mayor from 1948 until 1969.  He was preceded by Leland Speed, who developed Eastover and whose wife gave me three sculpting lessons in her home on Eastover Drive for free.  He was followed by Russell C Davis.  When I knew Thompson, he was an older man living near my grandfather.  I was too young to remember any of the horrible things he had done, and until I took Mississippi History under Jerry Mcbride at St. Andrews, nobody had ever told me.  I can't begin to list the many times that Thompson was on the wrong side of history.  I believed that HE believed he was doing the right thing.  Nothing in my memory of him says he was willingly an evil man.  Sometimes, it's doing what you perceive as the right thing that can be the most evil.

The other name I recognized was Jim Black.  A recent Supreme Court ruling specified that Southern Police could not enter private property to arrest protestors unless the owner advised them a crime was being committed.  On May 28, 1963, nobody at Woolworth advised the police that a crime was being committed at the lunch counter, so the police stayed outside on Capitol Street.  Some have suggested this was intentional, as it left the protesters inside at the mercy of the angry white mob that was forming.

The police chief in Jackson sent Black, a young inspector, into the store in plain clothes as an undercover agent, just in case things got bad.  Then things got bad.  White boys pulled protesters off their lunch counter stools and began kicking and beating them.  Having then witnessed a crime, Black arrested both the attacker and the attacked, charging one with assault and the other with disturbing the peace, an unfair charge for the protester who hadn't broken any law, but it stopped the attack on him and saw him safely transferred to a police van where the mob couldn't attack him further.

When I knew Jim Black, he was Chief of Police for Dale Danks.  As my brother's illness got worse, he had several encounters with the police; Chief Black had known my father since High School and did everything he could to help Jimmy.  By the time Black ascended to Chief of Police, the worst of the civil rights era incidents had passed.  He served during Jackson's most extended period of growth yet.  I was probably spoiled by growing up during this period and knowing the men and women who orchestrated it.  If you ever see me lose patience with Jackson's current government, it's probably because it's difficult for me not to compare them to our "glory days."  

The third name I knew in the lecture was one I knew I'd hear going in.  Ed King was involved in nearly every significant civil rights incident in Mississippi.  He paid a price for it, but he never let that slow him down.  King is the young man in the clerical collar seen in the photos below.  I don't remember a time when Ed King wasn't around somewhere in my life.  He is ubiquitous.  He's in the Sunday school class I joined at Galloway and attends by Zoom.   Some of the best legal and religious minds in Mississippi over the last hundred years are in that class, including King.  I've been on both sides of the aisle with King.  

Most of the time, I stand with him, but there came a day when Abortion Rights activists wanted to meet at Millsaps, and Ed King was against it.  I sat in a meeting with Stuart Good, Wayne Miller, representatives of the Clinic Defense League, and Ed King to discuss the issue.  Knowing that I was on the opposite side of King was one of the more intimidating moments in my life.  His feeling was that, as a religious school, we had no business butting into this political and moral issue.  My position and I think Stuart's position was that Millsaps was not taking a stand on the abortion issue, even though our students might, but we were renting one of our spaces (the heritage room) to an outside organization.  The event happened despite King's challenge.  

There weren't any incidents, and Rev. King didn't do anything to interfere, but I felt the heat on the back of my neck that day.   I've always believed you should try and understand the viewpoint opposing yours, and I believe I understood where Rev King was coming from, but to me, the students who felt strongly about preserving their reproductive rights were more important. Having to stand up to somebody you idolized is a pretty tough lesson.  I don't know if he ever knew what I was going through.  I'm sure to him I was just Jim Campbell's boy, sticking his nose in where it didn't belong.  I'm pretty good at that.  To be fair, so is he.

I don't have an ending for this, mainly because it's just not over.  Woolworth's is a parking garage now, built by the son of the Mayor who preceded Thompson.  Mayors Davis and Danks were both accused of trying to tear down all the monuments of the Civil Rights Movement.  If you look at downtown Jackson today, there might be something to that.  The Civil Rights Movement probably won't end in my lifetime.  For some of my youngest friends, it might end in theirs.  At least, I hope so, but something tells me "no".

Ray Mcfarland will say he's too old, but I'd love to see him in a new production of Mockingbird using the Sorkin Script.  He's not too old.  He's the same age as Jeff Daniels when he originated the role on Broadway.  I don't know if Francine is up for yet another production of Mockingbird, but they've done something like eleven million performances of Christmas Carrol, so maybe it won't hurt.