Father's Day

Good morning, Daddy. I miss you. Things got a little crazy after you left. I know you tried to prevent that, but sometimes you can't. Before you left, you said you were worried I lost my way. You were right. I lost my way, and it took a very long time to find it.

I thought I was following you when I focused my life on people who needed me rather than seeking out the people and things that I needed. That was a mistake on my part. I ended up spending much of my life alone because no one needed me forever. Helping people find what they were looking for often meant they weren't looking for me anymore.

I let Mississippi go to crap. I know it wasn't my responsibility to stop that, but I wasn't supposed to turn my back on it for so long. I let a lot of things I care about get in pretty bad shape, and now I have to haul ass to get them back on track.

I never really had anybody to talk to after you died. Many of your friends tried to help me, Robert Wingate, of course, but also Stuart Irby, Warren Hood, and Deaton and Taylor. Heck, J.O. Manning operated on my leg and forgot to charge me. No matter how sincere it is, I'm not very good at taking help.

I ended up spending a lot of time talking to Lance Goss. I know you weren't expecting that. Talking about his life helped me understand my own.

As healthy as he was, George Harmon left not long after you did. I suppose you guys had some project in heaven. We're still struggling to replace him. After a performance like that, how does anyone follow it?

Rowann ended up staying with Suzanne Marrs until the day he died. Both Jane Lewis and Brum Day caught Lou Gehrig's Disease. For a disease that's supposed to be pretty rare, it sure has taken out a lot of Jackson people. Brum was always one of the strongest guys I ever knew. The last time I saw him, he didn't have the strength to keep his jaw shut.

Things calmed down a lot with Jimmy. He died pretty peacefully. Whatever was eating at him never really went away, but it did get a lot less severe.

They ended up driving Missco into the ground after you left. This might be the first time I ever admitted that publically, but it's true. I tried to stop it, but I was outnumbered and in way over my head.  I think, ultimately, you built a chariot nobody else knew how to drive.  I certainly didn't.  

We fought a lot, but in many ways, you were the only one who ever really understood me, even though I think you wanted me to be something I wasn't. It took an awfully long time to understand what I was myself, so it's reasonable that you couldn't see it either.

Things were better when I could see you every day. I was pretty miserable, as you knew, but knowing I could talk to you whenever I needed made things a lot better. I never really found anyone to replace that.

I was born on Father's Day. A fair portion of my birthdays were on Father's Day. Now, I'm here, and you're not. I think the world would have been better off if those roles were reversed. I did everything I could to make sure I got where you are now before my time, but in the end, I decided I wasn't quite done yet.

I'd do anything to see you again, even for an hour. Happy Father's Day, Daddy. This year I've had more Father's Days without you than the ones when I had you. That's not really a milestone I thought I'd face. I miss you.

Aint From Here

Last night we talked about a guy who is something like a fifth-generation Mississippian and does business here, but for reasons of his own, chooses to no longer live here.  That happens quite a lot.  Mississippi, as you may know, has a shrinking population.  Despite a steady inflow of immigrants from Asia and Central America, there are more native Mississippians either dying or moving than being born, which keeps our numbers in the red.

One of my favorite parts about Thalia Mara is that she's not from here.  She came from a part of the world that generally doesn't think much of Mississippi, and we fairly recently had been in the news for blowing up a synagog and burying civil rights workers from the part of the world where she was coming from in an earthen dam.  She saw something in Mississippi that people who lived here couldn't.  She saw us as a significant place for ballet, of all things, and brought the world to Mississippi to appreciate dance.

The same is true of Catherine and Richard Freiss.  Their friends must have thought they'd lost their minds when they said where they were going to work.  Millsaps has a pretty great reputation, but it's not great enough to hide the fact that Mississippi is the poorest part of the United States, and we have a reputation for doing terrible things to people from their part of the world.  But still, they came, and generations of students from all over the South are the better for it, and students from around the world are better for the work they did while they were here.

Pop Primos came to Mississippi from Greece.  He could have gone anywhere in the world, but he chose to come here.  I guess in Greece, they didn't know that Mississippi was an economically depressed state, totally dependent on a non-sustainable crop and a caste system that was equally unsustainable.  Pop saw something in Mississippi to make his own, and there he built an empire of restaurants and real estate.

Woody Assaf's parents came from Lebanon at a time when maybe things weren't so great in Lebanon, but they weren't much better in Mississippi.  He could have gone anywhere, but he chose to stay here and became a broadcasting legend.

Stuart Good came here with his teenage son from somewhere like Wisconsin.  Jeff Good did really well at Millsaps.  He could have gone anywhere and done anything, but he saw something in Jackson that a lot of people who have been here for generations couldn't see, and that inspired him to start a business here and raise a family here and make himself a part of the fabric of Mississippi.

Peter DeBeukelaer came from Belgium, where his family had a successful business since the civil war.  He had an idea for a new product and wanted a place to make it a reality, and he chose Mississippi even though he could have gone anywhere.  

Mississippi is still a very troubled place.  It probably always will be.  There are still opportunities here.  Sometimes it's hard for the people who have been here for generations to see it, but it's still very real.  There are stories of successful immigrants to Mississippi starting today and tomorrow in areas that those of us who have been here a while might never see.    Sometimes, the keys to success is a fresh pair of eyes.

Birthdays

 In 1974, I turned eleven years old.  Life was pretty good.  I was doing better in school, and I had a paid-up subscription to Famous Monsters magazine.  Birthdays are a big deal to a kid.  I was looking forward to mine.

In 1974, my brother turned seventeen.  In years past, watching him live his life was probably my favorite thing to do.  By 1974 watching him live his life was really very painful.  His part of his generation was characterized by anger and rebellion.  The war in Vietnam was not yet over, and the music was getting angrier and angrier.  Nobody said it, but he had begun having addiction problems the year before.  Some of his friends had it much worse.   I can't really say when his problems turned from addiction to full-on schizophrenia and paranoia, but it was coming.  The police had to bring him home for a few nights, but he didn't get into any real trouble.  His best friend nearly died from eating the wrong kind of mushroom trying to get high.

My father belonged to a group called the Young Presidents Organization, which was basically a group of second-generation business owners who ascended to positions of power at a young age and wanted to make the best of it.  They met three or four times a year, but the summer meeting was always the "family session" where the members brought not only their wives but their children.

In 1974, the trip was scheduled to be five days at the Ponte Vedra resort in Florida.  Since this was the Rebel Chapter of YPO, all the conference spots were in the South East.  Since Ponte Vedra was big enough to host the group, we went there a few times.  

My grandmother lived with us for half the year, so in preparation for getting us all to Florida, my mother had to arrange for my grandmother to fly to my Aunt's house for her half of the year.  My brother was flatly refusing to go to Florida.  Part of his rebellion was being really angry at the establishment, which basically meant my parents.  

My mother had to get my Grandmother to Atlanta, somehow make peace with my brother since he couldn't be left alone, pack my other brother, my sister and me, and herself and my father, and get someone to take care of the dog in the days leading up to our flight to Florida.

Watching her struggle to plan everything, I said offhand, "That's my birthday." and my mother looked at me with a very quizzical look on her face.  "No, no, that's a couple weeks after." She said.

I was ten, turning eleven.  I knew when my birthday was.  I wasn't going to challenge her on it.  She had a lot on her plate, I knew, and family dinners had become very tense between everyone and my brother.  I looked at the dog and said, "You're right.  We'll deal with that later."  and went to my room.

YPO family meetings didn't actually provide much family time.  The grownups had seminars all day and golf and tennis when they weren't meeting.  The entire point of the thing was networking with people other than your children.  Counselors were provided by the resort to take us kids swimming or golfing or some other activity.  One day they took us to a marine park.  I'd seen dolphin shows in Biloxi, so I wasn't impressed.

During one of the tween movie nights, I said to one of the counselors, "Tomorrow is my birthday, but nobody knows."  I'm not entirely sure why I said it.  I had resolved myself to not fretting over it.  My mother would take care of it when we got home, I was sure.  Maybe I just wanted to have something to say to this person in a power position over me.  The movie about the lady trying to raise a great dane and some dachshunds had already been on television and didn't interest me.  I didn't say anything else about it and continued watching the movie.

The counselor I talked to had to be no more than twenty.  She was pretty, but in a natural sort of way; she wore no makeup and always had her hair pulled back.  Her main job was to make sure we didn't drown and give tennis lessons.  The next night, when we gathered for kids' dinner around the pool, she came out with a cake lit up with candles.  It wasn't a birthday cake.  I think they just got a chocolate cake the hotel had for their restaurant and put candles in it.  I was really embarrassed to get so much attention from strangers.  

My parents walked by on the way to one of their functions, and when my mother saw what was going on, she developed this very pained look on her face, then she did a very curious thing.  She looked at me with a very pained look, like I had betrayed her.  I really have no idea what she was thinking.  Clearly, she was hurt, but I started feeling like I was the one who had hurt her, like maybe telling other people it was my birthday was a really bad idea, that it was some sort of private secret between us.

When we got home and got unpacked, my mother asked what I wanted for my birthday.  I listed off the Aurora Monster Models I didn't have yet, so the next day she took me to Play Pen and got the models, paints, the kind of glue that was safe for kids, and a GI Joe Action Set with a white tiger.  Most years, I had some sort of party to mark my birthday, but not that year.  We didn't speak of it again until forty years later.  

I should have told my mother that I understood she was very busy and had much more serious things to worry about than my birthday, but I didn't.  I don't think it hurt me, and I wasn't really angry so much as I didn't really know how to handle it.  In a family of four kids, attention went to whoever was having the biggest emergency, and in 1974, that was never me.

When I turned sixteen, it happened again.  My brother had been in jail, and when my birthday came around, he was living in the mental care facility at St. Dominics.  My family let June go by with no mention of my birthday.  My girlfriend baked me a little cake from a box.  Her father had died just a few months earlier.  I found the body after he'd shot himself.  It was a really sad, uncomfortable birthday.  Just like in 1974, whoever was having the biggest emergency got all the attention, and at sixteen, that was anybody but me.  By then, I learned to take up as little time and space in the family as I could.  I don't blame them for overlooking me because I was doing my best to hide from them.

I never bothered much with birthdays after that.  My mother would always try to take me out to dinner, usually Nicks, because that was the nicest, closest place she could think of.  Some of the time, I would do it, but most of the time, I would say I was going to schedule the dinner with my mother but never would.

Sometimes relationships die of a thousand tiny blows rather than one big one.  My mother created me.  She taught me how to read when my teachers couldn't, but a thousand tiny blows ended up breaking the bond between us.  Her life was very complicated, and I was but one character in a cast of thousands.  There was pretty good proof all around me that there were far worse fates than being overlooked.  

Being the child that didn't need attention meant that if I was quiet enough, I could get away with whatever I wanted.  And did.   Living under the radar like that had its advantages, but I missed some very important lessons on how to share my life with somebody, and that would come back to hurt me later.  

I miss my mother very much.  When she died, it'd been fifty years since I confided in my mother the way a child should.  I was still the child who needed the least attention.  By that time, I was absolutely the child who wanted the least attention.  I don't resent birthdays; I just don't celebrate them.  That ship sailed quite a while ago.

Communists In America

Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and J Edgar Hoover all tried to prove that Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist but failed.  They couldn't openly destroy the man just for being black, so they found a way to disguise it.  Everybody hated communists, so they were determined to pin that label on him.

King knew people were coming for his neck from a fairly young age, so he made sure nobody could pin that tag on him.  In all honesty, while he did everything he could to improve the fate of the working man, I don't think he was a communist.  I think he was just a liberal, but he believed in private ownership and other capitalistic principles. 

There were communists in the movement, and everybody knew it.  I don't mean left-leaning socialists that the GOP now calls communists; I mean acolytes of Trotsky bent on an overthrow of the government.  I can't say that I blame them.  Communism offered to overthrow their oppressors and guarantee equality with their former masters.  For an African living in America in the twentieth century, I can see how that would be appealing.  

At the time, nobody really knew that Communism couldn't deliver on its promises.   George Orwell had an idea things might go bad for the communists in 1945 when he had the pigs say that some animals were more equal than others.  In China and the Soviet Union, that certainly proved to be true.  It might also have been a clue in 1940 when a fellow revolutionary put a pick into Trotsky's skull.  

Even with all these warning signs, I don't know that I could blame anyone living on the underside of Jim Crow America for clinging to that as some sort of last hope for a better life.  With a big faction of white America calling them communists just for demanding equal rights, I imagine quite a few thought to themselves, "Why not?"

In 1977 when a house painter planted a bomb in Beth Israel Synagog, the reason given was that Rabbi Nussbaum and his followers were communists.   Having known several members of Beth Israel in 1977, I can tell you they absolutely were not communists.  Some were more capitalist than I am.

I'm not sure how communism became the big bad in America.  Rosevelt had broken up the trusts ten years before the Russian Revolution, but I guess there were enough mega bankers left to turn the public tide against it.  A lot of what Huey Long proposed was technically communism, but nobody dared say it because he was so powerful.  

Communism didn't work for the Russians, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have worked here.  There weren't ever any real efforts to make America Communist, though, so I don't really get the fear.  Maybe people had called things communist that wasn't for so long that people began to see it as a threat everywhere.  

In the end, all the efforts to destroy King politically were pointless because somebody decided to destroy him mortally.  For a while, calling somebody a communist became something of a joke.  There weren't many real communists floating around America, and nobody cared about the ones that were.  Everything old is new again.  All of our ancient prejudices are bubbling to the surface again, and accusing somebody of being a communist is a serious threat again.  There are fifty-five years between 1968 when Martin Luther King was killed, and 2023.  Fifty-five is a good, round number.  I'd like to say we've made significant advances since then, but that wouldn't be true.