I got to spend some time with Brother Lewis today. We darkened the door of Fondren Public. I had a drink that a friend of mine named the Eudora thirty years ago. A few fingers of Makers Mark and a little ice if you have it, alone if you don't. Miss Welty, I think, took it with a little branch water. I modified it some. Ice melts, ya know.
Talking with somebody who remembers what it was like in Jackson and Millsaps thirty and forty years ago makes me happier than a warm puppy. It kind of needs to be a guy, though, because one of the things we're gonna talk about is girls, lost, found, and the ones that got away. The guys I can still do this with are getting pretty sparse these days. There's Tom and Doug Mann and a few others, but we're at the age with a fair number of our population is dropping away. Old white guys don't typically "pour one out for our homie," but if we had, we'd still be there. Those of us that survive the gauntlet will probably live until ninety. That's a frightening consideration.
Tom's Dad is a titan at Millsaps and Galloway and the United Methodist Church. To some, TW Lewis was one-half of the righteous brothers. To others, he was an agitator. In Mississippi, it turns out that the only people that had any sense were the agitators. At church, I like to listen to TW and Don Fortenberry talk. They experience a level of Christianity I've never approached, and there's much to be learned just by listening.
Tom mentioned that a friend of ours was getting fairly irritated with the goings on in the Mississippi UMC conference and just might take a trip to Tupelo and speak his mind at the conference meeting this summer. I don't have permission to say who it is, but if he goes, I might just go too. I have some concerns about what's going on in our conference to, so maybe we can do some good.
Talking with long-time Jackson people, it's hard not to lament what's been happening to the city lately. Of all the brilliant men and women we talked about, almost none still live in Mississippi. Ray Mabus once said that Mississippi's biggest export is brains. In Mississippi, we take our precious youth and work like hell to educate and train them; then, once they're on their own, we lose them because Mississippi can't offer them opportunities equal to the skills we've given them, so they find something bigger--maybe less complicated morally.
A lot of guys our age are thinking about giving up. They're moving to Madison or Oxford, or Hernando and pulling the world up around them. I can't fault them. They fought to keep Jackson growing all those years I was hiding in a cave. Maybe it's just my turn to get back into the fight.
I have a real need to one day be able to tell Tom and especially tell his dad that everything is OK now. Jackson and Millsaps are growing again, and the danger is past. Millsaps is doing light years better than Jackson, but both have a ways to go before I'm satisfied. Ultimately, I'd really like to make Mississippi the kind of place where parents don't have to worry about their children leaving for greener pastures. I don't really know how to do that, but, ya know, not knowing what I was doing never stopped me before.
No comments:
Post a Comment