Two Tiny Opals

I ended up on academic probation in college once because I was enamored with this girl from the Delta, and all we did for six months was smoke weed, drink, and mess around (if you take my meaning.)  

She was stunningly beautiful and exceedingly rich, well-read and quick of wit, but despite all of this in her favor, she had this wounded bird quality about her that is very likely what drew me to her and what drove her passion for not being sober--that and being from the delta where most people are never sober.  Nearly everyone I knew from there had a history of finding different ways to experience the universe, hers included a lot of Budweiser.  

Her laugh attracted me first, then she spilled almost an entire red cup of beer over me on the back patio of CS's one summer.  That's how we became friends.  I'll be friends with anyone who spills beer on me, then spills the rest over it over their own head and laughing to prove they didn't mean any harm.  

She began her career at Millsaps kind of backward by attending the Summer session first and then coming back in the fall.  In the Fall, she failed out of rush.  I don't really know how that happened, except maybe her party-all-the-time attitude in summer school annoyed some of the other girls.  Maybe she spilled beer on them too.  She was something like a quadruple Tri Delta legacy, but we didn't have a chapter yet, and the four we did have, didn't want her.

I can't really say that I was in love.  There certainly would be deeper wells to explore in that aspect of my life in the future.  I was, however, without a doubt, entangled in a very powerful spell.  I would have done anything for her and sometimes did.  When we both were three-tenths of a point away from a goose egg one semester, I pleaded on her behalf and my own with Dean Whitt to let us come back the next semester on academic probation rather than having to sit out a semester. 

It was very important to her that her father not know she had failed a semester.  Much like when she failed out of rush, my shirt was wet with her tears.  That, and the incredible softness of her fingers were probably the heart of our relationship.  While I could arrange that, there was, however, no way to hide the fact from my own father as he was intimately involved in bringing Dr. Harmon and Dean Whitt to Jackson in the first place.

"What happened, Buddy?"

I didn't lie.  There was a girl, and there was an awful lot of alcohol.  It was a moral failure on my part.  With my learning disability, he'd become accustomed to my academic failures, but this was something different.    We thought my days of academic struggles were passed.  A new obstacle arose.  

I approached my friend with the news that she could come back on probation without having to sit out a semester.  I told her things had to be different, that I couldn't spend all night every night drinking and laughing at the way cold cuts exploded when you threw them into a box fan.  I said we had futures to consider, and our parents expected more from us, and this was the right thing to do.  Her response was that we should see other people, and she had already begun.

For a long time, I had this tradition that whenever I broke things off with a girl, I'd buy them a necklace.  Nothing gaudy or even really noticeable, just a small drop, usually with an opal.  I went to Albrittons and picked out a piece that had two small opals in a sculpted gold setting that made it look like they were tiny pears hanging from a tree.  I showed it to my friend Lisa, over in Sanders Hall, explaining that even though she technically had broken things off with me, I still wanted her to have it as kind of a punctuation mark on our time together.

I wrapped it in creamy white paper and took it over to her apartment at the Groovy Grove.  In the interim, she had told me that, instead of coming back to Millsaps on academic probation, she was leaving Jackson and going to Mississippi State, and she was also spending all the time she previously spent with me with a boy I was in kindergarten with.  I gave her the box and said goodbye.  She asked if I wanted to come in, and I said I had to get to work.  My tie was already wilting in the July heat.

There were maybe five or six of these ritualistic necklaces given during my career.  All, very remarkable women.  I'm honestly curious if any of them still exist--the necklaces, not the women.  

They were hardly heirloom pieces.  Neither was I.  The future would bring worse experiences.  This girl really only wanted my time.  All of it--and my attention.  All of it.  I gave it willingly; you would have too if you'd seen her eyes.    This girl never asked me for a dime.  In fact, she usually paid for our trips to the liquor store.  In the future, there would be girls who really only wanted money from me.  Some, quite a lot.  They found themselves in very unstable situations and made a convincing argument that only I could help them, and I did.

In the Summer of 1985, there was none of that.  All this girl wanted was somebody who could keep up with her parties, which I admit was quite a challenge sometimes.  The first time I ever kissed her, her cheeks were still wet with tears.  I never knew what caused them, but there was some demon inside her that was driving all this passion for not being sober.  There was something inside her that caused a wound most people couldn't see, but was all I could see.  

In the end, whatever was eating her, I failed to defeat. That failure hurt a lot more than knowing I'd never hold her again and some other fella would.  I sent her out into the world with two tiny opals shaped like pears and my sincere wish was that whatever was hurting her would stop on its own because I could not stop it, even though I tried.  

My psychologist told me that I shouldn't seek relationships with girls who needed me.  I should focus on girls who enjoyed their time with me, not the ones who sent me on missions.    I told him that I understood what he was saying but that he hadn't seen her tears.  There was no way I could have refused her.  

I would see those tears gliding down many other tender cheeks over the years.  I never got very good at refusing them.   Eventually, I ended the tradition of giving away a tiny gold drop to end a romance.  It was meant to be a really noble gesture but ended up being sort of pointless, especially since none of them would ever be "the last time."  At least two recipients of my pointless gesture read my stuff.  If you're reading this: Hi.  I still remember you.  I remember it all.  

I guess, in the end, that was the point.  Whatever hurt them, I registered it.  I noticed them.  I remembered them.  Nobody should ever go through life without somebody noticing their wounds.  Maybe that's my superpower.   Sometimes, I take inventory of my past loves.  Most of these girls ended up becoming happy.  Some never did.  One didn't make it at all.  Maybe I wasn't supposed to fix them all.  Maybe I was just supposed to remember.

Land of Confusion

Ooh, Superman, where are you now
When everything's gone wrong somehow?
The men of steel, the men of power
Are losing control by the hour

This is the time, this is the place
So we look for the future
But there's not much love to go round
Tell me why this is a land of confusion

While the Lieutenant Governor is a little more than thirteen years older than I am, Speaker Gunn and I are within a few months of being the same age.  That'll be important later.  

The Medgar Ever's Institute sponsored a lecture at Millsaps College featuring Rev. Ed King, Dr. T.W. Lewis, and Jeanne Middleton Hairston yesterday.  The Evers Institute rents space in the John Stone House at Millsaps.  They easily could have found space at Jackson State or Tougaloo, but they chose Millsaps, which is a point that isn't lost on me.

Rev. King and Dr. Lewis are my parent's age.  They have children my age.  That point became important when Dr. Lewis was delivering his remarks, and he talked about a time when there was a racially motivated murder in his town.  He was trying to put his children to bed, knowing there were unknown men making threatening noises outside of his house, and the police chief refused to send a squad car to watch over the house.  

I grew up with Tom and Catherine.  Even though this was a while ago, the idea that some unnamed peckerwood was threatening them, I found upsetting.  I don't use that word very often, but I figure it fits here.

My whole life, I've heard stories about what Ed and T.W. went through.  Among Methodist ministers, they are considered heroes of a golden age, and you'll often see younger ministers watching out for them.  I'd like to think I have the courage to lead the kind of life they did.  I have a pretty big mouth; I probably would have got shot if I had tried.  

I will forever know Jeanne Middleton Hairston as Jeanne Middleton because that's the name I knew her by when she was the driving force behind the Education Department at Millsaps during a time when that was one of our most active departments.  Half the girls I knew took classes under her, and my former wife was one of her graduates.  

Jeanne is an alumnus of Millsaps.  She was one of the very first black students at Millsaps.  As a student, she helped Dr. Sallis prepare the textbook Mississippi Conflict and Change, which I wrote about earlier.  That book is out of print; by the way, I don't know what would be involved in making it available in Kindle format, but I'd love for that to happen.  

Besides Dr. Sallis, her remarks included JQ Addams and Robert Bergmark, who were still teaching at Millsaps when I was there and made a remarkable impression.  

Because my father served in the Korean Conflict rather than in WWII, I consider myself a member of Generation X, although, by most accounting by years, I came along at the very end of the baby boom.  Jeanne was born to one end of the Baby Boom Generation, and I was born to the other.  That was true of most of my teachers.  Nearly all of them were less than twenty years older than me.  David Culpepper is only like five or six years older than I.  

When I look at people on Jeanne's end of my generation, I see people like her, Andy Mullins, Dick Molpus, and Ray Mabus.  On the national scale, I see people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  While people like TW Lewis and Ed King broke the Rubicon in Mississippi culture, it was people in Jeanne's generation, their students, who cleared the way giving us passage to the other side.  

It's impossible to measure how much her part of my generation did for the people of Mississippi.  There's not much that means more to me than the people of Mississippi.  They did great work that made a huge difference.  My part of my generation seems to have forgotten that.

I mentioned Speaker Gunn earlier.  Dick Wilson gave one of the first fundraising events for his campaign.  For most of Phillip Gunn's career, I've agreed with about fifty percent of the legislation he supported or proposed.  He's conservative, and I'm moderate, so that's about right.  In the last ten years or so, that ratio has shifted remarkably.  I haven't gotten more liberal; he and his entire party have gotten considerably more conservative.  I see this a lot.  Many of the more radical names you hear in the Republican Party are in my generation and into Generation X.   I know the Regan Revolution came along in the early eighties.  Still, it's almost like my part of my generation has decided to work against everything Jeanne's part of my generation accomplished.

I asked Jeanne yesterday if it was too late.  Is this pattern cast in stone now?  I read a story the other day where over fifty percent of Mississippi schools still violate the federal desegregation decree.  We have a growing healthcare crisis.  Most of my generation chose to move out of Jackson rather than deal with a black government.

When he was alive, Medgar Evers believed that poverty was the greatest measure of the cultural failure of Mississippi.  I'd like to think we've made progress on that, but right now, we're backsliding, and it's almost entirely on the shoulders of people on my end of my generation.  

I know that most of my friends like to focus on those of us who aren't, but most of Mississippi is still very, very poor.  I'm guilty of forgetting that too.  Lately, our ship of state is listing heavily to that side.  We're taking on water, and it's like most of the guys my age just can't see it or don't want to.    

I asked Jeanne if it was too late if guys my age had broken the chain of progress.  She said, "It's never too late."  She's a lot smarter than me.  I hope she's right.  Sometimes I feel like I can't say I know she's right.  I don't intend to give up.  Sometimes it gets really lonely hiking out on this side of the ship, trying to balance the weight dragging us down on the other side.  There are a few of us doing it, though.  Let's see what happens.  

Product Review: Jean Jacket

PRIJOUHE Men's Denim Vest 

I mainly wanted this as a light jacket with lots of pockets.  I tend to carry a lot of stuff, and the inside pockets on this vest are gigantic.  I can fit my phone, gloves, a bottle of water, handkerchiefs, and more in them.

It has two side pockets, a breast pocket, and two really large inside pockets.  Wearing this is like Batman's utility belt.  

The denim is really heavy and durable.  It comes in a whopping 24 color styles (I got black) and sizes small to 5X.  They also offer the same jacket with sleeves, but in Mississippi, sleeves aren't that practical. 

Available on Amazon

 

First One Awake

 When I was very little, I was always the first one awake, the first one out of bed and out of my room.  I got to turn the coffee pot on and hear the morning farm report that came on at six and started the broadcast day.  Sometimes I saw the static that preceded it and the national anthem tape that was probably made in the fifties.  

Then things started to change.  My father didn't have time for breakfast anymore.  Once I was introduced to the concept of homework, I was also introduced to the idea that if it involved reading, writing, or math, mine was probably wrong.  Eventually, if I couldn't get somebody to check my homework before school, I just didn't turn it in.  I'd rather have a zero for not trying than to be told all the places I was wrong.  

Eventually, my brother down the hall began to change into something very different from what he was before.  One of the reasons I write about him, and try to be really very honest about it, is because there are lots of people who never knew him before he became ill.  I'd like for there to be more to his legacy than what became of him.

Before I learned how broken I was, how broken the world around me could be, how people who don't mean any harm to anyone can suffer for no reason, before all that, I was the first one to get up in the morning.  I loved the morning.  I loved the rising sun and the opportunity of a new day.  

Sometimes, I get all that back.  Sometimes feist-dog pulls the covers off me, and I'm out of bed before the alarm goes off.  Sometimes, I go into the sun thinking, "Boy, I'm lucky!"  But not every day.  Not anymore.  

The world wore on me pretty roughly.  If it was just on me, I think it'd be ok, but when I look around, a lot of people who never did anyone any harm got it a lot worse.  Somedays, the world is a blank canvas ready for opportunity.  Some days the world is a gauntlet testing how much you can take.  

I was a pretty timid boy.  Especially when it came to talking to strangers.  It wasn't so bad with grownups.  I think I was expecting them to understand that I stuttered, maybe even be amused by it.  I always loved the world though, and loved getting out in it.  There are days when I get all that back, and then there are days when I just want to keep the door closed and the lights out as long as I can.  

Mississippi is full of wonders when you're little.  It's full of doubts and fears when you're old enough to see the world as it is.  That glimmer of childhood optimism never really dies, though.  If it didn't die after all the things I did to it, then it's immortal.

The world starts when you turn on the lights and open the door.  The world is filled with challenges but even more opportunities.  There's an imaginary dog that tells me this when I remember to listen to him.