Stock In Academies

People talk about Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and how the South converted from Yellow-dog Democrats to the world’s most conservative Republicans.  Nixon was taking advantage of a situation that was already developing.  In 1969, most of Mississippi blamed the Democratic party for our position on the Rubicon of integrating our public schools and the panic that ensued.  When I look at the list of names of the men who formed the Board of Directors for Jackson Preparatory School in 1970, it’s really easy for me to see the seeds of a revolution.  I can’t look at a single name on that list and say, “I did not love this man,” but the truth is the truth, and the Republican takeover of Mississippi started in Jackson, and it started with those men, and it started over the issue of integration.

A lot of people are already tired of discussing the birth and growth of private schools in Mississippi around 1970.  I think it’s important we do discuss it because it has a lot to do with the state of our schools today, and the state of our schools today has a great deal to do with the state of our state.  It’s also important to remember that we were just children.  Nearly all of the people who made these decisions passed away ten years ago.  

You’ll often hear said that St. Andrews and St. Richards were parochial schools and shouldn’t be included in this, and JA was started as an alternative school that taught phonics in early reading as an alternative to what JPS was teaching.  All of these things were true.  These three schools were started under very different conditions than what happened in 1970.  When the purpose for them was formulated, the idea of most of white Jackson abandoning the public schools wasn’t a consideration.  When these schools began, nobody believed we would be forced to integrate.

St. Andrews, St. Richards, and JA all experienced massive growth in 1970.  While these schools weren’t created as an alternative to integrated public schools, there were parents who considered that, if they were going to leave the public schools, they would rather their children attend a school like that rather than a school like Prep or Manhattan.  My parents were one of these.

The superintendent of Jackson Public Schools told my grandfather to “tell Jim he better get those boys into private schools because I don’t know what will happen next year.”  Next year in this story was the year Murrah would be forcefully integrated.   Normally, a comment like that would be of concern, considering what my father did for a living; it was a paradigm shift and a huge amount of pressure beyond just wanting to do the best he could for his children.  For the superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, my father’s biggest client, to say he should move us out of the JPS system was disturbing on many levels, disturbing enough that this is what my parents decided to do.

My oldest brother went to Prep because his football coach was also going to Prep.  The same coach noticed my early growth spurt and the size of my arms and asked me when I was going to prep every time I saw him until I was a sophomore at Millsaps.  He caught me with a pitcher of beer at Mr. Gattis Pizza in the 10th grade and asked when I was going to Prep.  The rest of us, my other brother, my sister, and I, went to St. Andrews.  In the late 70s, there were some concerns about what was going on at St. Andrews, so my sister transferred to Prep, just in time to miss David Hicks.  That’s another story.

With integration, there was a lot of pressure for both JA and St Andrews to add a high school, and neither had the money.  St. Andrews spent a great deal of money building what remains one of the most attractive lower schools in Mississippi.  There were still loans out for it, and nearly all the sources they had for large gifts were tapped to build it.  

The high school St Andrews eventually built looked like it was erected by an entirely different organization than the lower school.  One building had a second floor that could never be used because the building inspector wouldn’t approve it, so the planned staircase was never built, and those rooms were used for storage.  Every so often, you’d see Jessie on the maintenance staff haul a broken chair-desk up an extension ladder to store it in this unused portion of the building so that it could be used for parts later on.

There was a struggle for a while to decide what the future of JA would be.  Many saw it as a feeder school for Prep.  Prep already had a preferred feeder school in First Pres, though, so the relationship became strained.  JA was also working under a different educational paradigm than Prep.  Prep was very traditional, basically, the same curricula as Murrah (since that’s where most of their staff came from), whereas JA was interested in more modern curricula (at least, more modern in terms of the 1960s). More than ten years into it, JA decided they, too, must have a high school, but where would they find the money?

While most of the banks had the motivation to loan these new schools money, they still required some backup to the loans.  More often than not, these came in the form of personal guarantees from board members.  Often, a willingness to personally guarantee a banknote was how one became a board member.  The money for these banknotes paid the construction companies, companies like my dad’s that provide chairs, desks, and blackboards, and most importantly, the salaries of the teaching staff, almost all poached from the public schools.  Some people will take offense that I use the word “poach” here.  I hold nothing against anyone who left a job in our public schools for a job in our private schools.  These people, mostly women, were excellent educators, and considering the stories I’ve heard about the chaos in the administrative side of Jackson’s public schools at the time, I don’t know that I can blame them for switching.

The idea of offering stock in the school as a way of raising a little extra money was a part of nearly every school other than St. Richards and St. Andrews; both of those had already built most of their lower school and had a more stable economic situation due to their parochial nature.  Many of these personally guaranteed notes were called as the need for money soon outstripped the money coming in from tuition.  Everything was happening so fast; this was almost guaranteed to happen.  Some of these men, who had to pay out of their pocket for the loans the school could not pay, took stock in the school as payment.  That way, for quite a while, when a new student would enroll and buy stock, they were buying it from Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones, who still had five hundred shares left from when he had to pay off the school's banknote.  

The question of integrating the schools was a complicated one.  Prep, Woodland Hills and Manhattan had no interest in integrating, they couldn’t legally refuse to admit anyone based on race, and there were parents who tested the waters, but no black students were enrolled.  JA had staff members who were very open to integration, but the cost of attending prevented it for many years.  Glenn Cain and I discussed this several times.  He even showed me some of the applications from black parents to prove he was telling me the truth.  Glen, I think, at times, was in an impossible situation where everyone wanted something different from him, and his own vision for the school became difficult to manifest.  Jesse Howell found it easier to realize his vision and get others to back him up.  Part of that was just his magnetic personality, but part of it was an unwillingness to challenge the status quo.  For many people, Prep was the new Jackson Central High School, but without any of that integration nonsense.  If you look at the board and the faculty, you’ll see the names of an awful lot of Central alumni.

St. Andrews and St. Richards were both very motivated to integrate on orders from their respective religious organizations, but again cost became an obstacle.  St. Andrews ultimately became the first private school to integrate willingly.  They were, and are now, pretty proud of that.  While he was a good student and well-liked, there was still an enormous economic gap between white and black parents, and the cost of attending St. Andrews prevented him from graduating there.  His presence started something, though.  Soon, every grade would have at least one black student, and the number grew every year.  James Meridith sent his sons to St. Andrews.  During my entire tenure at St. Andrews, there were talks of merit-based and need-based scholarships, with experiments with both.  While nearly everybody was in favor of it, paying for it was an obstacle.  It was expensive enough to keep the doors open; adding that sort of expense on top proved too difficult.  

A lot of us noticed that black students would drop out around Jr High School.  Part of that, I think, was the idea that, if their parents were going to spend that much money, it’d be better invested in the early grades so their children got a good foundation.  I’m sure the idea that being around other black students as a part of social life was also more of a consideration in the upper grades.  

The baby boom had already stretched Jackson’s educational resources thin.  Although considerably larger, Murrah wasn’t nearly the architectural marvel of Bailey or Central.  The cost was the primary consideration.  Jackson barely had enough money to meet its public school needs and then voluntarily put on themselves the added burden of duplicating it as private schools.  Considering just how much of a task this was, regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, makes me have some respect for the people who did it.  It was, however, a horrible idea.  None of the terrible things predicted to happen at Murrah happened.  There were no murders in the hallway, and the drug problem at Murrah was considerably smaller than the drug problem at the private schools.  The kids who stayed at Murrah got every bit as good of an education as the kids who went to Prep.  The difference is, Prep is well-funded and going strong today, but Murrah struggles to meet the basic needs of its students.  Murrah is far more segregated now than it was in 1975.  We’ve struggled to keep a superintendent of Jackson Public Schools every year since 1970.

A lot o people don’t want to talk about this.  “It was fifty years ago.”  “We were children.”  “The world is different now.”  All of this is true, but when I look out at what’s happening educationally now in Mississippi, what I see are the scars that were left when most of Mississippi abandoned the public school system.  Scars that won’t heal unless we talk about this.  A lot of people think they’re safe from all this as long as they can send their kids to private schools.  It’s not that simple.  Our culture and our economy depend on the families who can’t afford to send their kids to these private schools.    Your kids who went to private schools will be left with the same unanswered questions we were left with by our parents, and the longer we take to address these issues, the more our society will become polarized and dysfunctional. 

Prep, St Andrews, and JA all seem pretty well-heeled now.  That’s an illusion created by fifty years of investment.  The first few years, the schools looked nothing like that.  Mississippi still struggles to meet its basic educational needs.  If you look at the money spent on our private schools, it might become clear where the money went.  The cities that are now mostly white won’t remain so.  We didn’t escape the problem of integration; we postponed it.  Sooner or later, those chickens will come home to roost.

Knight-Errant

Every once in a while, somebody will say, "yeah, Boyd, but which one did you love the most?  There were a lot of them, but which one do you think about the most?"  That's a challenging question.  Obviously, I think about it often, but do even I know the answer?

Some of them came to me because I was headed in the same direction they were headed, and it's nice to have somebody walk with you for a while.  These were a lot of fun, but they weren't my favorite because, as nice as they were, there just wasn't the passion I was looking for.  They were great companions for a while, though, and I'm very grateful for their time.

Some of them found their lives in a jam and needed somebody who had more than they needed, so they could have some of mine.  Those weren't my favorite, but they were right, I had more than I needed, and they were in a jam, so it worked out. 

Some looked down the road ahead and were really very worried about what they saw ahead.   They had a pretty good idea about how much they could take, and what was ahead looked like it was much more than that, so they needed a bigger, stronger friend to walk with them for a while and soak up some of the arrows so they could get to the peaceful part of the road, a little further down.  That's not my favorite either, but I didn't really mind, and they were right; I could absorb more arrows than they could, at least for that part of the road.  

Some thought I'd be very different from what I was.  They thought they wanted somebody like my dad, and while I can sound like him sometimes, I'm a very different person.  These were nice, but they weren't my favorite because they never really got to know me very well.  They moved on once they found out I wasn't what they thought.  

Some lived their lives drowning in a puddle of pain.  The world didn't always see it, but it was always there.  Sometimes, under the right conditions, I could act like a sponge and soak up some of that pain and wring it out away from them, and for a while, they could live free of the puddle.   Those could have been my favorite because it's really rewarding to see somebody in pain live without it for a while, but it was always just a while; no matter how hard I tried, the pain always came back and filled in where I had taken it away.  

I don't think I was ever supposed to love one the most.  I think I was supposed to be a bridge through uneven terrain for people who were afraid of what lay on the road ahead.  You're not supposed to stay on a bridge because that blocks the other people who need to use the same bridge.  Bridges can be really cool and really beautiful, but they're not a destination.  They're a way to a destination.

For the most part, I'm happy with the role I've played in all their lives.  There are some companions where I wish I could have done more, but that's kind of my nature; I always think I could have done more.  I never asked to be a knight-errant, but I've never been unhappy with the role.  Alonso Quijano lost his mind and became Don Quixote, but some would say he found it.

Where Do The Children Play?

Our mom's generation tells us about how they would put on starched cotton dresses with half a dozen petticoats and white kidd gloves and go shopping downtown with their friends.  Everything they could ever dream of was in three or four stores, and their entire school, which was the entire town, would have hamburgers and milkshakes and cokes at the Woolco lunch counter, and she'd talk about how great it was, and it was great.

My generation tells their children about how they put on the coolest stone-washed denim mini dress, half a bottle of aqua net, and twist beads and went with their friends to the mall.  Their entire school was there, and the kids from all the other schools and we'd meet in the foodcourt and have those corndogs they make in front of you and Orange Julius, and then maybe go play a video game, and we'd talk about how great it was, and it was great.

Our kids talk about how they'd call each other on Skype but not turn the camera on because their hair looked like shit, and they were wearing the same hoodie they wore the night before, and they'd log into Amazon and see what the prime deals were.  When we asked why they never go out, they said the mall is gross, and it's not safe downtown, and they'd talk about how shit it is, and it is shit.

We could have made a world for them where the malls were cooler than ever and shopping downtown was beautiful and safe for everybody.  We could have done it, but we didn't.  We tried to make a world like that, but your mom had that operation, and maybe I had a couple of affairs, and it's not our fault anyway; it's the woke liberals and the conservative fascists.  You don't know how hard it was to raise yu kids, and I fucking hate my job, but I did it for you! It's George Soros and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump--they did this; I was just trying to live my life, man; nobody told me it was gonna be like this.  Nobody told me it was up to me!

When you get my age, you start looking around, and that guy in Washington was in your pledge class.  That guy in the governor's mansion was on your brother's baseball team.  That chairman of the bank used to try and call your sister, and you took his ex-girlfriend to the prom.  We made this world.  It wasn't somebody else.  It was us.

Every day, I talk to guys who want to blame somebody else, some other party, some other culture, or some other part of the country.  It's a lot easier to sleep at night when you think it was somebody else who did this.  It's a lie, though; we did this.  

Our kids are graduating high school, graduating college, and some are hitting that thirty-year goalline.  Pretty soon, we'll be handing the ball off to them.  They won't know we're handing the ball off to them because you never realize you were carrying the goddamn ball until you're sixty and look back on what happened in your life.  This is the world we made.  This is the world they'll make.  Maybe they'll do it better.  

Oh, I know we've come a long way
             We're changing day to day
                         But tell me, where do the children play?

American Colonization Society

Some edits of "Birth of A Nation," of which there are many, end with a title card praising Lincoln and his plan to repatriate the Africans if only he had lived.  Lincoln was indeed a member of the American Colonization Society, one of the few topics slave owners and abolitionists agreed on.

Abolitionists believed the plan to return Africans to Africa was the kindest possible plan.  Since they were taken from there, returning them there offered the best possible outcome for these people who had been wronged by enslavement in America and the Caribbean.  Southerners supported the plan because if slavery ended, there would be millions of now-free Africans in their territory that might be angry about the treatment they received as slaves and pose a threat to the safety of their white former owners.  

These are people who really knew very little about Africa, and what they did know was a hundred years before.  In the 19th century, Ottomans and Europeans were divvying Africa up between them, and with the death of Shaka Zulu, there was nothing but each other to prevent it.  If you go to Africa now, most of the countries that are now Christian were colonized by Europeans, and the countries that are now Muslim were colonized by Ottomans.  Even in their own country, Africans were not safe from our control.

ACS members didn't consider that, with very few exceptions, most former slaves didn't know what part of Africa they came from and to whom they were related or owed allegiance to in Africa. So once they got there, there were rejected by both the whites and the blacks.  They were men without a country. 

The colonies set up by the ACS had even less funding than Rowanoak, and having lived in America for two hundred years, many of these people had lost whatever immunity they had to African diseases.  

Had Lincoln lived, this is probably the plan the country would have followed, either sending the Africans back to Africa or to areas set up for them in Central America.  It would have been a disaster and brought about a human crisis almost as bad as the war itself.

Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Mustard Seeds

There was no Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame for the first half of my life. The Jackson Touchdown Club met once a year in the ballroom of the Walthal Hotel and handed out awards to guys who used to play football. 

My father won it for "leadership." I guess he wasn't that great at football itself. My Grandfather won it for his 30 years as an SEC Referee, where he was also blessed with three fuzed vertebrae when an LSU player tackled him and the man with the ball at the same time and spent the rest of his life walking with a cane and listing to the right.  

The Touchdown Club was kind of a good ole' boy thing but a well-thought-of one. Their meetings usually consisted of about ten tables and maybe forty people. The one I went to Saturday had around sixty tables and at least a thousand people. There are very few places in town with a ballroom big enough to hold that crowd.

Michael Rubenstein started working in Jackson when I was in my later teenage years. He was from Boonville, but many people thought he was from New York because of his name. Rubenstein was a reporter for WLBT and quickly took over the sports department. All three stations had a sports department, but Michael decided to distinguish channel 3 and himself by simply working harder.

Rubenstein was kind of a solitary guy. I'd see him sitting by himself at the bar of George Street and later at Hal & Mals, but I almost never saw him pile into CS's with the rest of the WLBT News crew at the end of the ten pm broadcast. My friend Doug Mann used to get drunk and say, "Hey, Look! It's Bob! Bob Ballou!" Referencing the Desi Arnez song when Howard Ballou came in. Ballou took it in good spirits, but I'm sure there were times when he thought, "What the hell?" to himself.  

When Rubenstein took over at WLBT, the city had just built Smith-Wills stadium. Some people want to call it the Hank Aaron Stadium. I'm against that. Aaron was born in Mobile and played in Milwaukee and Atlanta. He had nothing to do with Jackson, whereas both Smith and Wills were well-known characters in our history.

Smith-Wills existed because Con Maloney was an Irish Catholic guy with a lot of drive, motivation, and money, and he wanted minor-league baseball in the capital city. I think the world of Con Maloney. He was a Millsaps boy who left the school with his feet running. They ran him to the State Senate and the boards of everything from Millsaps to Trustmark to St. Dominics. 

In the corner of the Smith-Wills complex was a high-school league field, and besides that was a tiny museum dedicated to Dizzy Dean. That was the start of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
Michael Rubenstein had an active mind and a lot of ambition. He used his position as Mississippi's top sports broadcaster and the business connections he made through Con Maloney to start the idea of a "Sports Hall of Fame Museum" to take up a spot in the parking lot of Smith-Wills, that was at one time considered for another High School field.  

They showed the drawings for the proposed Museum on the television, and I thought, "Boy, that's gonna be a lot of money." Even then, I was getting jaded by guys showing off impressive architectural renderings for things that never happened. Mississippi didn't have a lot of money. Jackson didn't have a lot of money. Getting this thing built was gonna be a considerable challenge.

I underestimated the sheer tenacity of Michael Rubenstein. It took about six years, but the Museum was built. Next door to it, Jim Buck Ross started putting together his plan for an Agricultural Museum, and pretty soon, that part of Lakeland Drive was pretty impressive. Part of his vision was to evolve the Jackson Touchdown Club into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame, which is where I was Saturday Night.  

A lot of Millsaps guys have been part of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame since its inception. Saturday night was important to me because it featured two guys who were at Millsaps when I was at Millsaps. Saturday, they announced the first recipient of the Bill Hetrick Community Service Award. Afterward, they inducted Coach Jim Page into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. Jim has coached baseball at Millsaps for thirty-four years, starting not long after I graduated. That's a remarkable run. In the modern world of sports coaches, that kind of tenure is unheard of. When I met these guys, Jim played, and Bill watched and sometimes kept team stats. After that, we'd all end up at the Texas League Champion Jackson Mets games, usually on the third base side, where a guy with a cooler would bring you a beer. That's about all the luxury a man needs.  

Mississippi is a humble place. Jackson is a humble place. Millsaps is a humble place. Never underestimate us, though. Michael Rubenstein's passion project intersected with so many lives of the people of Mississippi. I've watched this story grow from the smallest seed. In Mississippi, you really need to stick around to see the end. The parable of the mustard seed can show up in unexpected places.

I know Victoria's Secret Too

 In her song “I Know Victoria’s Secret,” singer Jax reveals that Victoria’s secret is that she was made up by an old man living in Ohio.  She’s right, but there’s more to it than that.  

Victoria’s Secret was invented by a man named Roy Raymond, who tried shopping for foundation garments at stores like Sears and found the experience inadequate.  Underwear for both men and women was produced by the same companies that produced them for the troops in WWII and sold them in packs of three, mostly in white, but sometimes prints or pastels for women.  Raymond was aware that the most successful clothing mail-order catalog that wasn’t Sears was Fredrick’s of Hollywood.  He had the idea to do the same thing, but less trashy and in a better location than West Hollywood.  Not knowing much about California, he picked Palo Alto for his first store and produced his first catalog with two sigs (16 pages) and a cover, which immediately sold out.

In the late 1970s, Les Wexner studied the growing patterns of young women shopping in the new phenomenon of suburban malls.  He combined that with the fashion sense he gleaned from the more popular women’s fashion magazines and found low-cost producers to make similar items priced for middle-class young women, with the result being The Limited, which by 1980 was almost entirely located in suburban malls.

Wexner was much better with money than Raymond, and in 1982, offered to buy out a bankrupt Raymond and add Victoria’s Secret to Limited Brands.  With the deal completed, Wexner was the unchallenged “King of Malls” and remained so until total sales in malls started falling off in the new century.

Jax’s song suggests Wexner might have been creepy.  He might have been, but not in an Aqualung sort of way as the song suggests, but in more of a Merchant of Venice sort of way.  He’s not eyeing little girls with bad intent, but he is making an awful lot of money.  

I’ve heard people read the long “I am a jew” speech from Shylock, suggesting that Shylock might have been a sympathetic character, and Shakespeare might have been sympathetic to Jews.  He was not.  Like a lot of Shakespeare’s work, you really need to read the whole play.

Wexner was responsible for a lot of things.  Among them are the move to women sexualizing their bodies at a much younger age, even younger than the “flapper” movement in the 20s.  He promoted an unrealistic body image that lead to an epidemic of eating disorders.  Between the fast food business and the fashion business, Americans have whiplash with regard to how they should feel about food.  

Wexler was also one of the first to move most of his production to Asian sweatshops with lax or no rules regarding child labor, so you ended up with a situation where pacific islander twelve-year-olds were manufacturing clothes sold to American sixteen-year-olds, who had to hide them from her father and change clothes in the car before going out to meet her friends.  

He did all this to make money, and he did make money—lots of it.  I think it’s important to do what Jax does and reveal how these things happen, so you don’t end up with young people who all they really know about the people marketing to them that “it’s cool” or not.  It’s an awful lot more complicated than just cool or not, and maybe songs like this are the best way to get the message to teenagers who really don’t have much time for us.

Sunday Sermon July 30 2023

 The governor came to church today.  It’s good for the church when he comes, and it’s good for him when he comes, and I don’t mean politically (although that might have been a consideration.)  I can’t promise there weren’t twenty people around him praying that Jesus would remove the scales from his eyes, but I’m pretty sure he knew that was part of the job when he took it.  

There’s a lot going on in his life, including a second run for governor of Mississippi.  A little bird told me he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his reception at the Neshoba County Fair, so that might have something to do with him being butt in the pew this morning.  To my way of thinking, a candidate who is a little dissatisfied with the job he’s doing is a lot more beneficial than the guy who thinks he can do no wrong.

I like Tate.  We have a lot in common.  When he was a student, I used to talk to Matt Henry about him when they were both KAs at Millsaps.  Matt liked him too.  I wish I could talk to Matt about anything again.  A lot has changed for Tate since he left Millsaps.  A lot of his views have gone from fairly moderate to, I don’t know what to call them now.  I honestly don’t believe in my heart that Tate honestly believes in a lot of the things he’s been pushing for lately, but I think the men pulling his strings and making promises about his future career that they’ll never keep are leading him astray of his own judgment.  

I’m not the guy who’s gonna say Mississippi needs a Democratic government because, quite frankly, considering the state of the Mississippi Democratic Party right now, other than about four people, I wouldn’t trust them to organize a fish fry.  A lot of people think Presley can turn it around, but that’s an awful lot to put on one guy.  We’ve had strong Democratic governors before, but they served when there was a strong Democratic Party backing them up.  People call William Winter Mississippi’s greatest governor, and maybe he was, but he had a team of some of the sharpest guys I ever met behind him, both on his staff and in the legislature.  

With a word, Tate could do more good than I could with a year's effort.  Good for Mississippi and its people.  With just a few words, he could make huge strides in healing the schism in the United Methodist Church in Mississippi and solving the hospital crisis in Mississippi.  I don’t think that word is coming.  I think there are men with a very impractical vision of Mississippi holding carrots in front of Tate’s nose and dangling swords over his head.  Those words aren’t coming.  

Not long ago, a senior member of Tate’s party told me he thought “market forces” would solve the problem of Mississippi hospitals.  It was a moment that took my breath away a little.  I didn’t say anything, but what I wanted to say was, “Dick Wilson came to me thirty-five years ago and said you wanted to run for office, and you were a solid conservative, and I should give you a listen–which I did.  Somewhere along the way, you and some other guys changed the definition of what a conservative means, and now you’re as useless as tits on a bull when it comes to solving Mississippi’s problems.”  I didn’t say that, not because I’m a gentleman, but because I don’t think he’d listen to me, and I didn’t want to get in a fight in front of people.

After Sunday School, I thought, maybe some of us who Tate either knows or knows of should go see him with hats in hand and talk to him about what Jesus wants for Mississippi, and I don’t mean what Jesus wants for the unborn babies of Mississippi, because right now being a born baby in Mississippi can be a pretty sketchy proposition with way too high of a chance for a horrible ending, and he’s much more able to solve this than me or any of my friends.  I’m not good at begging, but I’d beg for the people of Mississippi.  I’d beg Tate Reeves to remember what he was taught at Millsaps and make choices based on what the people who are trying to live here need, not based on what some conservative talk show host says is important.  You going on Fox News isn’t going to save one malnourished baby or one heart attack victim living in an area without a hospital.  

Going to church should mean more than just going to church.  Cary was sick today, so Susannah delivered the sermon.  Her sermon was about presenting a welcoming face to the world and the good it can do.  In it, she discussed her time ministering to Aids victims at a time when most people weren’t very educated about how Aids spread, and there were few effective treatments for it.  She made the point of how powerful a simple human embrace could be for someone whose own family is afraid to hold them for fear of the disease.  She didn’t know the governor would be in the pews before her this morning.  She didn’t even know she would be preaching.  I know he heard what she was saying.  Whether it reached into his heart is between him and Jesus.

If I could talk to Tate today, I’d tell him that his heart is a lot more likely to tell him the truth than whoever is whispering they’ll send him to Washington in his ears.  Hopefully, he realizes he’s not the first guy they did this to.  Tate’s smart enough to pass comprehensive exams at Millsaps.  He’s smart enough to figure this out.  He just needs to listen to a higher power.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

 I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at the Capri Theater and dined on the fried catfish plate that was delicious and finished with the apple cobbler.  In a lifetime of going to movies, the Capri offers the nicest, most complete experience yet.  Even better than when I saw Silent Running and Escape From The Planet of the Apes there.

I’ve always felt a great deal of existential tension about the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer.  As a teenager, I read that a 13-year-old boy built a working atomic bomb for a science fair project.  It was even the subject of an episode of Barney Miller.  I took this to mean that I should learn to build one.  Along the way, I learned that the story about the 13-year-old boy was greatly exaggerated.  He lacked not only the plutonium but also the shaped-charged explosives to make his model work.  

The segments of a California orange inspired Oppenheimer’s team to create shaped charged explosives in such a way that it created an implosion into a small container of plutonium with sufficient force to break apart the atomic bonds in the plutonium.  They made a bomb powerful enough to use the fingers of God to split apart the basic structure of the universe, making an even bigger bomb.

My knowledge of this never settled well with me.  To excise it, I made a folded paper model of Fatman and Littleboy; the devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  There’s a sequence in Nolan’s film where they crate up Fatman and Littleboy and drive them away on the back of trucks, leaving Los Alamos, through Jornada del Muerto, in correspondingly large and small crates, out of the laboratory out into the history books: fame and Infamy.  Seeing them, I thought: “Hello, old friend.”

I’ve made excruciatingly detailed scale models of these devices in folded paper, then destroyed them when it began to concern me that keeping them around was an imperfect reflection of my mental state.  Maybe it was.  When I met some of the worst people I’ve ever known on the internet, I imported those files into Blender and made a .obj file out of them, which I then imported into a virtual world filled with truly objectionable people.  I’m not sure what my point was other than to say this exists, and you exist, and I can’t really break it down further than that.

There have been several films about the creation of the bomb; this one goes from Oppenheimer’s early years in Europe through the trinity device test and ends with Oppeheimer’s confrontation with the McCarthy era insanity.

Like many turn-of-the-century Jews, Oppenheimer once entertained the possibility that communism might provide his people with the safe and beneficial environment they desperately wanted.  You saw this sort of worker’s philosophy working its way through art and literature, and science in an era when men believed in the concept of a better world.  Many intellectuals saw the Russian experience with communism as a deformation of the optimism felt in the early worker’s movement.  Oppenheimer, like many turn-of-the-century Jews, felt a great sense of betrayal when Russian communism became what it became.  

There have been many historical investigations into Oppenheimer’s history with communism, and no one has ever been able to come up with more than that.  Like many intellectuals, he would be criticized for his involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the communists there.  There was a strong sense of antisemitism in the McCarthy era persecution of pre-war communists.  In the theater where I saw the movie, a woman cackled anytime communists were mentioned.  I’m not sure what that portends, but it’s been my observation that the communist witch hunts have returned.  

Nolan used his trademark cinematic style to portray the guilt Oppenheimer felt about what his creation became.  This was clearly the strongest of all the themes explored in the film.  The effect is really very strong in a Dolby-enabled theater.  I doubt it will have the same emotional impact on a home system.

Clearly, Barbie will be the most successful film this year.  Oppenheimer might be the most important.  Like a lot of important films, some people won’t enjoy it.  The intensity of it becomes a different sort of entertainment from what some people pursue.  Murphy as Oppenheimer and Downey as Strauss are standouts.  Much has been said about the performance of Florence Pugh and Tom Conti as Einstein.

It’s a movie about people much smarter than anyone you know discussing the basic structure of the universe and how to unlock the awesome destructive forces of God himself.  The sequence covering the trinity test itself comes at the end of the third act.  It’s powerful and effective at putting you into that scene, that moment in human development.

In the bible, it talks about God’s power to smite entire cultures, and he did. Before Oppenheimer, that ability was reserved for God.  Based on the book, The American Prometheus, Oppenheimer stole the fire from Olympus and gave it to men.   I’ve never lived in a world where this power didn’t exist.  The year before I was born, the Russians sent missiles with atomic weapons to the island nation of Cuba.  Mississippi was well within striking distance.  

As a physicist, Oppenheimer pondered the death of stars; as a leader, he gave us the means to bring about the death of humanity.  Only a physicist could do that.  

Gun Statistics - Real Life

 Here on the front end of sixty, here is the tally on my experience with guns:

A few dead deer.  Several dead ducks and doves.  A few dead squirrels, which I feel bad about because we didn't eat them; we just killed them.  

Three near-fatal accidents.  Three accidents where only property was damaged.  Six suicides and two suicide attempts.  Two murders.  Three armed robberies and two assaults with a deadly weapon.  

What I have yet to experience is anybody using a firearm to protect life, liberty, or property, including the police.  I've heard of it happening, but I have yet to witness it or have it happen close to me.  

If you look at the FBI statistics for Mississippi, my experience is pretty normal.  Despite what the NRA says, you're statistically more likely to accidentally shoot yourself or someone else than you are to use a gun to defend yourself.  You're also more likely to use a gun to kill yourself.  Whatever effect the 2nd amendment hoped to produce, this is what it did produce.

The other argument in favor of the NRA's interpretation of the 2nd amendment is that it gives us what we need to defend ourselves from a tyrannical government.  Well, we tried that too.  The result was Jackson burned to the ground, and Vicksburg was under siege for so long people were eating rats and mules to survive.  Our economy was destroyed, our railroads unusable, and more than six thousand Mississippians were dead.  People like to say we killed more Yankees than they killed of us, but that's not true.  Mississippi was a turkey shoot.  We've received accolades for fighting as hard as we did, but we were brutalized, and the right to bear arms didn't help us.

Reasonable gun laws start with looking at things how they really are, not how we'd like for them to be.  I don't know why we're not using guns more to protect life and liberty, but at the moment, you're a lot more likely to take these things with a gun than to protect them.

Whatever the intention of the 2nd amendment was, whatever the potential the 2nd amendment has, the result we're getting now is the exact opposite. Clearly, we're not interpreting this correctly, and since one organization is almost entirely responsible for how we interpret the 2nd amendment, the fault pretty clearly lies with them.

Moonwatcher and Oppenheimer

In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke introduces the character of Moonwatcher, a proto-human and the alpha male in a tribe of ape-men who are in conflict with another tribe of ape-men over access to a water source.  A fight for survival.

In filming this section of the book, Stanley Kubrick used the same actors and the same ape-men costumes to represent both Moonwatcher's tribe and their enemies.  Moongzer's mask was different, more articulate, and more detailed than the others, but all the other masks were taken from the same mold.  Kubrick calculated (correctly) that by having the actors play double roles, both as the protagonists and the antagonists, it would look like he was using more ape-men than he actually was.  

Despite Kubrick's clever means of filming the sequence, Clarke had a different point in mind.  Clarke wanted to show that these proto-humans were extremely similar genetically; what tiny differences there were made them mortal enemies, and extrapolating that point out tens of thousands of years, Moonwatcher's tapir bone weapon used to kill his enemy becomes a satellite loaded with thermo-nuclear weapons, pointed at earth.   There are minute genetic differences between us and the Russians, and yet we stand (as we actually did stand at the time of the film) moments away from destroying each other.  Moonwatcher is both Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Although we see a leopard kill and eat one of Moonwatcher's tribemates, the real threat, the difference between extending his genetic material and oblivion, was the other ape-men.  

A principal theme of the 1960s was xenophobia on many levels.  Arabs hate the Jews.  Russians hate the Americans, whites hate the blacks, and North Koreans hate the South Koreans; all genetically very similar, but all are perceived as a mortal threat by their counterpoint.  In 1967, when Kubrick and Clarke were making 2001, in Mississippi, some white men in a truck set bombs in the office of Perry Nussbaum in the Beth Israel synagog in Jackson.  After tens of thousands of years, ape-men were still willing to kill each other over access to water they could have shared.

Clarke was a very prolific writer.  Much more prolific than I.  Of all his works, 2001 remains his most famous by far.  It's hard to say if it's a hopeful work or not because the aliens make us take the next evolutionary step even though we still have death pointed at each other.  He discussed the matter further in 2010, but not that many people read it, and even fewer saw the movie.

This weekend, when Oppenheimer comes to Jackson, I'll see it at the Capri.  I'll also spend some of the time thinking about Arthur C Clarke and Moonwatcher.  We can't seem to escape what he said about us.  

State Flag Conspiracy

There's a fairly popular myth that woke liberal politicians broke in and changed the Mississippi state flag in the middle of the night, despite the people's wishes.  There are a couple of problems with this theory, the first being that there are only about eleven woke liberal politicians in the Mississippi state legislature.  They're not very organized, and they usually go out at night.  Sometimes all night.  While that might warm the heart of Mississippi's most conservative souls, it's just not what happened.

Lauren Stennis devoted a fair portion of her life to changing the Mississippi State Flag.  Lauren was to the left of me on many issues, and we often didn't agree on things, but on this, we did.  I made every effort to very visible support her efforts.  I believed it was important.  Lauren deserved a win on this.  She did the work.  She was tireless and devoted, and she was, more than anything else, right.  You should have been able to tell your grandchildren about the woman that changed Mississippi's history, it would have made me and a lot of other people very happy, but that's not what happened.  The referendum Lauren fought for lost.  It lost by a much larger margin than any of us expected.

The story's not over, though.  The same battle over the South Carolina flag was heating up.  Students in South Carolina started demanding that the NCAA take a stand.  The NCAA isn't a hotbed of woke liberals, either.  They'd really rather do anything than deal with stuff like this.  Somebody at the NCAA did a head count, though, and it was pretty evident that there were an awful lot more descendants of federal soldiers and Confederate slaves playing football, basketball, and baseball than there were descendants of Confederate soldiers.  Some of these descendants of Confederate Slaves were saying things like they would boycott games in or with South Carolina teams if they didn't change their flag.

The NCAA is about playing football, and this business in South Carolina was threatening that.  The NCAA said, "Y'all gotta change," to which South Carolina said, "Screw you!" and that's when the NCAA said, "Until you change, we won't sanction any championship games in your state.  With protests increasing in the state and pressure from the NCAA, South Carolina capitulated.  The attention then turned to Mississippi.

In Mississippi, the chancellor of Ole Miss (New Miss, according to James Meridith) wanted nothing to do with a fight over the confederate flag.  His position was that it was needlessly divisive and had nothing to do with improving the university experience.  He was right.  His solution was to get rid of the confederate flag but keep the name "rebels."  That seemed to appease nearly everyone.  

After the flag referendum failed and the University of Mississippi cooperated, the NCAA turned its attention to the state capitol and threatened the same sanctions they used on South Carolina, starting with taking away championship games and then becoming more punitive from there.  

Threatening Confederate symbology is one thing.  Threatening football is another.  Very soon, the college board, College presidents (both public and private), and college coaches began pressuring the Governor, the Speaker, and the lt. Governor (all Republicans) to do something.  Universities and colleges began refusing to fly the state flag.  Some cities refused to fly the state flag.  Governor Bryant started looking for a way out of this.  Finally, at the end of June 2020, the Republican legislature of Mississippi and the Republican governor retired the Mississippi state flag.  They did it in hopes we could get back to business.

A lot of people still have copies of the Stennis flag, now known as the "hospitality flag."  In my mind, Lauren will always get credit for this, even though it didn't work out the way she wanted.  Conservative Republicans changed the Mississippi state flag because they loved football more than the confederacy.  I haven't a bit of a problem with that.  Mississippi doesn't ever do things in a straightforward way, but sometimes we get them done some other way.

Tate and Aldean

Tate Reeves decided to throw his hat into the "Don't Try That In A Small Town" ruckus.  He had some energetic support from people who ain't from here.  People from Mississippi were far more concerned with "What are you gonna do about hospitals, Tate?" and at least one poor soul asking, "When y'all gonna give me my flag back."  I suspect that's the same guy who posts on every Mississippi-related post about Mississippi.  There's a "neo-confederate" Harley gang in Pearl, whose members all look like they are old enough to have been actual Confederates.

Since this story isn't going away, I did a little digging.  Don't Try That in a Small Town is the number one song on iTunes.  That it was iTunes struck me.  On Spotify, Amazon, and Youtube Music, Don't Try That in a Small Town doesn't finish in the top one hundred.  It doesn't even finish in the top 50 on the country lists."  What's the discrepancy?

I honestly had forgotten iTunes still existed.  When my stepdaughter was 13, she wanted more than anything to have an iPod, so I got her one.  When she nearly got us all arrested downloading songs from Napster, I made sure she had, and only used, an account on iTunes.  That was the last time I engaged with iTunes.  

iTunes clings to life as dead last in the music browser wars by holding onto some market segments that don't update their game very often.  One is certain older parts of South Korea, which is why nearly every other song after Don't Try That in a Small Town in the iTunes top ten was K-pop.  The other segment that still clings to life using iTunes is older white Americans who signed up to iTunes from an AOL account thirty years ago and never updated it.  I also learned that it's incredibly easy to game the numbers on iTunes using bots, mainly because even Apple hasn't cared about the product in twenty years.  

I'm not a journalist, and if I was, I'd probably be a crappy one, but I uncovered all this before my coffee got cold, and yet so many major news outlets and public voices, including the Governor of Mississippi, didn't bother to mention that the story is a fluke, and possibly a fake.  

With the possibility that the story might be fake, or at least greatly overstated, I became much more interested in what's going on there than I was in Jason Aldean and his little song.  There's not really enough evidence to accuse anybody.  There is smoke, but is there a fire?  With that in mind, I started trying to figure out who might benefit from a fake story.

There are forces on the left that want very much for you to believe there are a bunch of crazy white racists trying to take over the country.  There are, actually, but their numbers aren't anywhere near as large as the news might make you think.  Since the left-leaning media already has that meme out there, they would have some benefit from feeding it, and a story like this certainly feeds it.  

The other thing I thought about was that if you look at the lyrics of the song, it picks up on a lot of memes that the NRA is currently pushing.  His management, I'm sure, is aware that Aldean shares a market with the NRA.  When I see lyrics like: 
 
    Got a gun that my granddad gave me
    They say one day they're gonna round up

the NRA sprang to mind. That's an idea they've been pushing with a fever for thirty-five years. If somebody was going to use bots to change the iTunes popularity results, the NRA is a prime candidate. Whatever the NRA was made to be, they now have a reputation for using pretty sketchy tactics.
There's also the very real possibility that once one news agency reported the story, everybody else jumped on the bandwagon because they needed stories to fill their top fold. The news business is still a business.

A lot of the people responding to the governor's post seemed to think that country music ain't what it used to be. I can't really address that. Everybody gets to a certain age when they're mad that the current music isn't like the music that was popular when they were teenagers. There's an awful lot more money in country music than there used to be, so whatever else happens, that's going to have an effect.
Ultimately, none of this is a solution to anything. A hundred Jason Aldeans with their grandaddy's gun wasn't going to stop the BLM riots, nor solve the problems that led to the riots. That's a popular American myth, but it's still a myth. Kyle Rittenhouse cried like a baby in court because he believed in this myth enough to kill somebody but not enough to make even a small dent in what was happening. The NRA and Fox News made him a hero, and the left made his mom a villain, but neither side mentions the fact that what he did made no difference in what happened at all. People dying in riots just make the riot bigger.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that I don't think the story here is the story. I think this is a tempest that's drawing attention from a lot of other, much more important things.

Don't Keep Secrets

My wife and I used to argue because she thought my version of her was a lot more optimistic than what she saw in herself.  I think one of the reasons she wanted to get married was that she wanted the things I said about her to be true.  

When a child loses confidence in themselves, we have a tendency to blame the parents, but in her case, I knew them before I knew her, and that wasn't the problem.  

Sometimes, I think people just have trouble finding the things they're good at.  Everyone has them, but not everyone knows what they are.  A lot of us tend to judge ourselves based on what other people are good at.  I do too.  That's a rigged game, though.  You have your own gifts, and it's utterly unfair to judge yourself by someone else's.

I've loved a lot of people where I really wanted them to see what I saw in them, just for a few minutes, that if they could see just a glimpse of the power and beauty that I see, it'd make it real for them.  

The girl before my wife had the same problem.  I just wanted to shake her and say, "Don't you see!  Don't you see!" but she never did.  She lived out the rest of her life without seeing what I saw.

I used to write really long letters explaining exactly why I felt about someone I loved the way I did.  I think maybe that might have helped me share my vision with these girls, but someone came along before them and made fun of it, so I gave up on the practice; now, the opportunity to share this is lost to time forever.   

Don't just tell people you love them.  Tell them why, and don't assume they already know.  They often can't see it, but you can. 

Tolkien and Creation

Because his life wasn't as full of so many personal tragedies as his friend Lewis, Tolkien never vacillated between belief and atheism as Lewis did.  Tolkien was born a Roman Catholic and remained one all his life.  Many people have written about how Tolkien's theology helps inform and shape his fiction.

Despite his devotion to Catholicism, Tolkien believed that the Romans, by converting Britain to Christianity, had destroyed, displaced, and erased the complex cultural mythos that existed there when the Romans arrived.  He held up Stonehenge as proof that, before the Christianization of Britain, there existed a thriving, complex, and developed culture with a fully developed mythos of their own.  

Whatever these proto-Britons believed, all we had left of them in Tolkien's time were these stone "henges," massive rings of carved stone distributed around the middle and south of the island nation.  Tolkien died in 1973, Missing the discovery of the Lindow Bog Bodies, which date to the time around the building of the henges, and suggested a surprising (and disturbing) possibility that the proto Britons practiced human sacrifice.  Greek and Roman writers had for generations accused these so-called "druids" of human sacrifice.  Here was the proof.  

In Leeds and again at Oxford, Tolkien made a living for himself as a linguist.  In particular, he was an expert in Germanic and early English languages, making a name for himself by interpreting and studying Middle English epic poetry.  Before and after the First World War, Tolkien was known for his study and interpretation of Beowulf.

Tolkien decided he could use fiction to replace the lost British mythology, and he would use Beowulf and the Prose Edda as his models.  This became The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Simmilarion.  

Like all mythologies, Tolkien had to address the issue of creation, in particular, the creation of man.  Like many cultures, the proto-Semitic races that became Judaism proposed a creation story where the progenitor god created men from the soil.  Nearby cultures suggested clay, dust, and even the foam of the sea.    All these near-eastern myths shared a similar concept.  Men were impotent copies of the progenitor god and would be used by the god or gods as pawns in some larger game.

Tolkien was aware of the pointy-hat, fake beard-wearing "neo-druids" who pranced around Stonehenge on the equinox, but he didn't think much of them.  He was convinced that they and the horror writers of the sixties who produced works like "The Wicker Man" had it all wrong.  

In Tolkien's mythology, men are still pawns of a progenitor god, but he creates several levels of creation, each possessing less and less of the divine spark.  First was the Istari, the Wizard class, which had a shade that became the Balrog.  Then came the Ents, and their shade, the trolls.  Elves and Orcs, Dwarves and Hobbits, and then men.  As the creative spark of earth wore on, all these sentient creatures would filter down to men, and men were all that was left.

Tolkien never intended for his creation to replace or weaken Catholicism, but I've heard quite a few uninformed people call it satanic.  We assume that most mythologies come from generations of people blending their stories together; Tolkien does a pretty credible job of it working alone.  Perhaps it always was just lone writers working alone all along, only we renamed them prophets.  

I Didn't Like The Nursery

I always felt like being an introvert like I am was such a disappointment to everybody, particularly my mother.  She tried so hard to get me to socialize with other kids, and it almost never worked.

We tend not to think of kids with learning disabilities as "disabled", but if you can't speak normally, or read normally, you feel far more different from the people around you than you really are.

I remember when I was five, and my sister was two, my mother took us to the nursery at Galloway, so the rest of the family could attend church in peace.  Jim Wilkerson and Jim Moffett were already in there running around like they owned the place, knowing exactly where all the toys were and how they worked.  My sister was over with the toddlers, organizing a group of ten, planning a day when they'd all wear the same color pull-ups and the rubber pants with the lace ruffles on the bottom.

I don't remember who the other women were, but my mother was talking to Mrs. Keyes and pushing me out in the play area, pretending I wasn't resisting.

"I k...., I Ka...., I k-k-k a, I can't go over there!" When I'm nervous, my words don't come.  They especially didn't when I was little.  Normal stuttering, I don't mind.  I'm older than Moses now, and I'm used to it.  Those times when the words just won't come though, when I can't get past the first two or three syllables without having to start over, even now, that makes me feel inadequate.  When I was little, it made me feel like an alien.

I looked up at my mother, doing my best to plead with my eyes without actually crying.  Crying would just make it worse.  "Please take me home," I thought.  "Please, please, please take me home."  I tried this playschool thing.  I really did.  I wanted to be a good boy, but my words broke, and now I'm gonna cry, and if I cry, what's next? Will I wet my pants too?  "please take me home.  Please, please take me home."  

One of the things that started to drive a wedge between my mother and me was that she pushed me to the very limits of my disability.  It was absolutely the right thing to do.  Without it, I would have remained hidden where it was safe forever and never sought out ways around my disabilities.  It separated me from my mother, though.  She was no longer the place for safety and comfort.  The only place where I found safety and comfort was being alone, and that's where I stayed most of the time for the next fifty-six years.  

You really can't question a mother's love.  She might have even known that pushing me beyond my boundaries might push me away from her, but it was more important that I go out and stretch my wings than staying cuddled under hers.  That's a horrible choice to make, but sometimes life is about horrible choices.

You can't really tell that I stutter now.  It seems like an illusion to me like I'm putting on some sort of performance.  If I let my guard down, or if I'm caught by surprise, my words still break sometimes though.   It's absolutely unnerving, even now.  Working through my stutter conceals my shame and provides me with false confidence.  When the illusion breaks, I feel dishonest, like a magician might if a curtain falls down unexpectedly and his entire illusion apparatus is exposed.  

I'm sixty yeas old, but I still stutter and I'm still dyslexic.  It's who I am.  I learned ways to disguise it and work around it, and even sometimes make it work for me, and that I owe to my mother, who made me stay in the nursery, even when I was terrified and begged to be brought home.  

The Song of Summer Visitors - First Draft

 With San Diego to his right and the Pacific Ocean to his left, Marc expertly turned the steering wheel of his old, but maticulously maintained truck down the ramp edging the trailer with the skiff on it into the water.  Tyler watched his grandfather with rapt attention, like he was watching a ballet.  There was nothing Tyler loved more than sailing with his grandfather.  There was nothing Marc loved more than Tyler, even the sea.

Years ago, many years ago now, Marc tried to teach his wife how to back the trailer down the ramp.  He tried and tried, but she never got the hang of driving in reverse with a trailer behind.  When it became clear that she only had a few years left to live, Marc’s wife, Tyler’s grandmother, asked him to take her out to sea one last time.  He lifted her frail, emaciated body out onto the boat, then miles off shore, in the lanes where the whales pass from North to South, under a starlight sky, she passed from this world into the next.  

He wrapped her body in yards of linen he found at an abandoned craft store with enough stones from her garden to make sure her body went to the bottom of the sea, and he gently lifted the woman he loved over the side of the boat and dipped her into the sea, which would become her final home.  Watching the shrouded white figure of his wife sink into the sea, he heard the impossibly, long keening song of the whales, joining him in this moment of sorrow.

The skiff today had the same body as the boat Marc buried Tyler’s grandmother with, but in the years since it’s had many upgrades, including an array of photo-generator cells on the roof of the cabin, condensed batteries that would hold a charge for years.  The cabin was big enough for Tyler and Marc to sleep, and stored enough food and water for a month’s excursion.  

With the skiff, afloat, inspected and secured, Marc parked the truck, and he and Tyler set sail.  Many years ago, Marcus shucked oysters, bussed tables and tended bar so he could pay his way through college with a marine biology degree.  He had two jobs, one was cataloguing and observing the number of cetaceans that passed by San Diego for the California Dept of Wildlife, and another leading tourists in the winter to see gray whales, and blue whales in the summer.  Watching human beings observe and interact with these ancient and mysterious creatures made him very happy.

Clear of the dock, Marc raised the sail, and steered seaward.  His thick, white hair, with curls as thick as his thumb blew in the wind.  Tyler’s hari was the same texture, same cure, but glossy black.  They set sail.  Marc’s strong broad hand on the tiller, his deeply tanned skin wrinkled at the knuckles.  A roadmap of tiny wrinkles in his ancient flesh, the veins in the back of his stand out beneath the bleached white hairs.

Tyler sat forward.  His job was to hold the lines to the Jib and keep it in trim.  A few feet away from his grandfather, tyler studied the chords flowing back from the top of the jib to make sure then went back straight, tugging the line for the jib to one side or the other if they began to flap.

Marc could easily make this trip by himself with just the mainsail, but Tyler liked having responsibilities, and doing things to make Tyler happy was the point of life these days.

With more than an hour to go before they reach their destination, Tyler intensely watched his sail, while Marc intensely watched Tyler.  Tyler loved his grandfather.  He loved sailing, he loved his parrot and he loved chocolate, but he’ll never know the feeling of loving his own child, or grandchild.  That made Marc very sad.

Marc’s grandmother taught ancient history at a private catholic academy in San Diego, long before the city became what it is now.  Through her connections and utilizing his keen mind, Marc won a scholarship to attend.  One day  a boy asked if he was named for Marc Anthony.  “No,” Marc Said.  “I’m named for Marcus Aurelius, one of the five good emperors and a philosopher king.”  

With a strong steady wind, the sea rippled against the hull of the skiff.  Tyler focused his eyes out to sea and said, as he has many times before, “Tell me how the world ended, grandpa?”  Marc sighed.  The ruins of San Diego were still visible behind him.  The architectural glass skins of the towers long ago broke and dropped away as the steel and concrete skeleton of the buildings began to buckle and collapse under the weight of time.  

Tyler was exceedingly intelligent, but he was nine years old.  For nine year olds, telling the same story over and over provides some comfort for them.  Tyler knew there were a million stories about the past, but this was the story of his past, and as horrible as it sounds to you and me, it was fascinating to him.

Marc’s eyes focused.  He wanted to tell the story honestly and correctly, but in the way a nine year old would understand.  Tyler had been nine years old for seven hundred years, so Marc had the opportunity to practice this enough times to make it perfect, but it was never any less painful.  

“You were six,” Marc said.  “You were six years old when the virus hit.  It hit first in Greece, but within a year spread to the whole world.  People had been talking about the end of the world, probably since the world began.  Some thought it would be fire.  Some thought it would be flood.  Some thought the hand of God would smite us.  Some thought zombies would eat our brains.  Some thought we used use nuclear weapons to destroy ourselvles.  Some thought an asteroid would take us out like the dinosaurs.  Nobody expected something so tiny it couldn’t be seen would destroy the world.”

“There were a little over eight billion people on earth when the virus hit, within a hundred and fifty years, there would be less than two million.  It would take a hundred and fifty years for the world’s population to bottom out and stabalize, but within five years of the initial outbreak, everybody left on earth stopped aging.”

“You were six then the outbreak began.  You aged three more years after than, then your body stopped getting older, but you also stopped getting sick.  Your body became able to heal itself of almost anything.  Your nine years old now.  You’ll be nine years old forever.”

“Some people died very quickly once they became infected.  Your mother died five days after she contracted the virus.  Your father was deployed in one of our stupid wars in Eastern Africa, so it took a week for command to get the message to him.  With the world dying, we ended the war pretty quickly and your father came home.  He lived another five years.  Your grandmother another twenty.”

“If the virus didn’t kill you, it turned you into superman.  No disease could touch you.  I was seventy-three when the virus hit, but my body never got any older.  My skin was still wrinkled and old, but my muscles and my organs worked better than they did when I was twenty.  My hair came back, but it was all stark white as a seagul.”

“Something about the disease responded to hormonal changes in the body.  Once your body started to show the first sign of puberty, you quit aging.  You’re strong and healthy and really very, very smart, but you’ll be a little boy forever.  Ther’s a little more than two million people left on earth.  About a quarter of them are little kids like you.  The rest are grandparents like me, mostly grandpas.  Everybody inbetween died out.  We’re all that’s left and we’re not getting any older.  This fall, it will be seven hundred years since the virus broke out.  You and I never got any older.  We never will.”

“Something about the disease made me desire the company of a woman again in ways I hadn’t thought about in twenty years.  Your grandmother and I were very happy for almost seventy years after your mother and father died.  We took over a big house on a hill.  I had enough knowledge of mechanics and electronics to keep everything running.  The people who owned the house converted it to solar power long ago, so there was always electricity.  Your grandmother was a whiz at raising vegetables and chickens, and that’s how we lived for a long time.  We were happy in a world that was dying, dead really–except for us.”

“The disease made our bodies incredibly strong.  The only thign that could kill an infected person who survived was dispair.  There were stories of people who gave up on living after the world died, but found it almost impossible to end their own lives.  Almost that is.  There were a few ways left to break an unbreakable body.”

“The disease killed off anybody who had normal adult hormone levels.  People who had reduced hormone level like your grandma and me survived the first wave of the disease.  Little kids like you who hadn’t started the puberty level of hormones survived too.  Everybody in between died within twenty years, leaving just old people like me, and young people like you.”

“A lot of old and a lot of young people died, but some survived like we did.  For some reason, the diseae lasted longer in men that in women.  Men who were infected and survived were almost supermen.  Women who were infected and survived were too, but for some reason, for many of them, the disease would one day just stop working.  The immortality the disease gave them ended, and they began to be susceptible to diseases again.  That’s what happened to your grandma.  The disease extended your grandma’s life, then it ended it.”  

There are women left in the world, but not many, and those who are left don’t have much need of men.  Some have grandchildren of their own to look after.  Some are hold up somewhere using the kybernet to communicate with what’s left of mankind, some still trying to find a cure.

It wasn’t long after people began theorizing that sub atomic particles could communicate with each other regardless of constraints of time or space than people began developing a way to communicate on the sub atomic level, allowing computers to exchange information without wires or radio transmission, even through space without the constraint of c2, the Speed of light.

This way, humans on earth could communicate, in real time, with the human colonists on Mars.  There were less than three thousand people on Mars when the virus broke out.  There are almost forty thousand now.  They live completely separately from the humans on Earth.  Any interaction carried the risk of the virus infecting the Martian population, which would spell the end of mankind.  The last uninfected human beings in the universe live on Mars, and they are growing and prospering, turning Mars into a beautiful living planet again, like it once was.  Humans lived, grew up, fell in love, had children, grew old and died agian, but only on Mars.

“I’m gonna be a little boy forever.” Tyler said.  “FOREVER!” he shouted in the winds, with an impossibly happy look on his face.  “Forever,” Marcus said, with a tear in his eye.

By instinct, Marc knew where to stop.  He lowered the mainsil and tied it to the boom.  He pulled fried eggplant, tomato and pepper sandwiches out of the cooler, so he and Tyler could eat in the cool breeze.

“Is this the spot?” Tyler said.  “I think so,” Marc said.  He’s been knowing where to stop for seven hundred years.  He knew even before the disease, but now he knows weeks before when his friends are returning.  They speek to him in his sleep.

“What does it sound like,” Tyler said, “when they sing to you?”

“Do you know what it sounds like when you can hear their song through the hull of the skiff?”  Marc asked.  “It’s like that, only louder, and longer, and only when I sleep.”

“What do you think they say in their songs?” Tyler asked.”

“I think they say, ‘hello friend.  I’m coming soon.  I missed you.’” Marc said.  The old ones sign to me first, then the younger ones, then the younger ones become the older ones, and the new younger ones are born.  The older ones teach the younger ones the song, and tell them about their friend in the boat.”

“There was a time when men hunted whales.  They cooked down their bodies to make lamp oil.  They used their teeth to make women’s corsets.”  Marc thought it was important for Tyler to know the whole history.

“Whale teeth are like giant feathers, they strain the tiny shrimps they eat of the water.” Tyler added.  

“That’s right.  It’s called ‘Baleen’ and they used that to make girdles for women so they wouldn’t look fat.”  Marc grinned while Tyler puffed out his cheeks and stuck out his belly like the photos of fat women he’d seen.  Tyler could barely remember meeting any women ever.  What he knew about people he knew mostly from photographs.  

“Why do you think the whales chose you to talk to?” Tyler asked.

Marcus looked out to sea.  “I think I chose them.  I’ve been studying whales since I was a little boy like you.  The disease made me able to do things I could never do before.  I would remember word-for-word books that I read when I was thirteen.  I could hear and identify the song of birds miles away, and when I sleep I can hear the songs of whales at sea.”

“And they tell you when they’re coming!” Tyler said.  

“Well, I’ve known what time of year they were coming for a very long time, but their songs in my head let me know when shales I knew were coming near.”

“Like Notch!” Tyler said, excited he remembered the name of one of grandpa’s friends.

“Like Notch,” Marc said.  Notch was one of the first blue whales Marc recocognized from one season to the next as blue whales made their way North to South past San Diego.  There was a noticeable notch taken out of his dorsal fin.  Marc assumed it was from some sort of accident, maybe a shark attack when he was a juvinile, but it must have been some sort of congenital defect, because Notche’s children had it, then grandchildren, now the great grandchildren of notch pass by San Diego every year, with the song they sung to Marc passed down from generation to generation.  

When men stopped hunting whales, there was some concern that blue whales were near extinct, but once they were protected, they started making a comeback.  Now that man’s pollution dropped to almost nothing when their population was decimated, whales traveled the oceans in numbers not seen since before men learned to sail.  

“When you think they’ll get here?” Tyler asked.  

“Pretty soon now.  We’ll sleep here tonight.” Marc answered, and pulled out his guitar to play songs Tyler knew.  Marcus liked songs written by a man named Yusuf Islam, who died a century before Marc was born.  He played “Morning has Broken, Peace Train, and Father and Son, a song Marc understood too well, but Tyler never would.”  They sang into the night and ate grapes, blueberries and figs, and waited for the whales.

Marc woke with the sun.  He made coffee while Tyler slept.  When the world goes from a population of eight billion down to two million, there’s an awful lot of somethings left stored in warehouses.  Marc knew of a dock side warehouse that had entire containers of freeze dried and vacuum sealed coffee beans.  Enough for the rest of his extroridinarily long life.  He might be the last man on earth to enjoy coffee in the morning, but enjoy it he would.  Tyler slept in the tiny cabin as the yellow fingers of the sun stretched across the world.

Soft at first, but growing louder, long, deep whistles vibrated through the hull of the skiff.  “Wheel, wheel, wheel, wheeeeeeeeeel.” they sounded.  Tyler sprang into awakeness.  “They here!” he shouted.

Tyler scrambles to the deck of the skiff, hanging onto to the stanchion so he doesn’t go over.  Marc uses his binoculars to scan the horizon.  “There!” He shouts, pointing to the north.  A spout breaks the surface of the water, then another, then another.  A pod of whales was coming towards them.  

“Quick!” Marc shouted, as he raised the mainsail and tyler raised the jib.  They turned the skiff in the direction the whales were headed and waited for them to catch up to them.

The flukes of a blue whale are twenty-five feet wide.  Almost wider than the skiff is long.  They look slow because they’re a hundred feet long, but blue whales are remarkably fast.  Soon there are spouts on both sides of the skiff, as the pod slows it pace to travel in time with Marc and Tyler on the skiff. 

Tyler looks out and counts two adults and two juviniles with notched dorsal fins.  The great grandchildren of his grandfather’s whale.  The largest whale, an ancient female with a notched fin breaks the surface not twelve feet from the skiff.  She’s many times longer than the skiff, which looks tiny and frail now.  Her pectral flipper reaches under the skiff and nudges it’s keel.  Tyler shakes with excitement when he feels her touching the boat.  He can smell her breath as she spouts mere feet from him, the mist falling down on his shoulders.

For most of the day, Tyler and Marc sail in the middle of a blue whale pod.  Animals they’d known for years, descendants of animals they’d known for seven hundred years.  Marc was seven hundred and seventy eight years old.  Tyler was seven hundred and six years old.  Their bodies never aged, they never feared death, and neither knew how long this would last.  

As the sun began to set, the pod pulled away from the skiff.  Their journey was many miles yet.  Tyler sat in the cockpit of the skiff with his ear to the hull, listening for the last of the whale songs.  

Marcus Aurelius Delehandro studied the tan shirtless chest of his grandson, in an eternal hope that one day, a black hair would appear among the downy white fuz that constituted most of Tyler’s body hair, some sort of sign that this arrested life might one day start moving again, that one day his precious grandchild might still become a man, then an old man, then a grandfather like himself.  It crushed him knowing that tyler’s life would never be complete.  

There’s not much to compare with the love of a grandparent for a grandchild.  It’s easy to think you’d want that to go on forever, but when the day came that it did go on forever, after seven hundred years, the thought that consumed Marc’s life was that his grandson, the last heir of his family, the last living human being he loved on earth would never live a life complete.

Tyler never understood this.  He was happy to be a boy forever, as boys usually are.  Marc had no friends who ever understood him, except in the summertime, when the whales swim by and spend the day with their old friend.

An Elven Messenger In The Woods

Sometimes I run into people who, even if we never interacted so much before, my life and theirs intertwine like the roots of two trees in the same patch of forest, deep and wide pushing through the same soil, pulling out the same moisture and nutrients to keep our leaves alive and send out new buds.

Wanting to be a writer, calling myself a writer, and actually being a writer are all very different things.  I can, and did, type a thousand words a day for forty years, but I'm still not a writer because unless I offer those thousand words for anybody to read, it's not communication; my typing is a dead message with no listener.  With no listener, there is no writing.  

When the prospect of turning sixty came into my sights as a reality, I decided that regardless of whatever health challenges I have left (which get fewer every day), I should mend this situation.  God created me wanting to type a thousand words a day, more than wanting to--needing to.  If I don't get my words out in a day, I feel incomplete, and if I go two or three days without it, depression starts to set in.  I don't know how much I believe in the idea of "God's Plan," but I don't believe that much of a compulsion to do something would come without there being some purpose in it.  

I knew I could do the work.  I've been doing it as long and sometimes much longer than I've known most of you.  Other than my brother and sister, there's a pretty small fraternity of people who knew me before Mrs. Kitchings suggested I learn to type.  Doing the work and getting it out in the world are two different things, so I decided that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed to start making connections with writers.  I grew up seeing Willie Morris and Larry Brown in bars and Eudora Welty at parties and socialite functions, but that's something different.  I needed to make connections with people who were trying to do the same thing I was doing, only better and with more confidence and more experience, who could show me the way.

Since today's prospective college student consumes twenty times more new media than traditional media, one of my strategies for the past two years has been to identify and amplify the social media message from organizations that are important to me.  I know how this works.  The social media companies "publish" millions of messages every day and decides how many people to show this message to by how much engagement the message gets and how much engagement the sender normally gets.  That means if I like, comment, and share the social media messages of the organizations I care about, then it greatly increases the chances that the social media company will serve the message to another target of the message, in this case, prospective students and prospective donors.  

This might sound dumb, but tapping "heart" or typing "Great Job" on the stuff Millsaps posts makes a huge difference.  Every time you do it, you increase the algorithm score on both the message and the school.  As a side benefit, whenever I log into social media for the day, I get a pretty comprehensive run down on what's happening on campus, a task I used to accomplish by strolling around campus or just talking to Joe Lee Gibson while he emptied the garbage cans.  

This way, I end up knowing, every day, what's going on with the Phi Mu's, what's going on with Food Services, the Baseball Team, Campus Pride, The Many Adventures of George Bey, and what was the original kernel of this story, whatever Liz Egan and the Writing Center was doing, which one day included a one-sheet about the McMuling Writing Workshop.  Having just seen it that morning, I mentioned to my sister in church that maybe I should go to that.  She said I should.  Having that conversation at that place at that time with that person probably meant something.   I was still basking in the blessing Cary transmitted to us at the end of his sermon, so when I got home, I shot off an email to the address on the post, which I assumed would be Liz or one of her students.

Preparing for the course, I sent in the possible first chapter of a book I'm working on, and the first person to respond to it was a woman who I knew worked at Millsaps named Isabelle Higbee.  Even though it said "Ezelle" in her Facebook profile, I wasn't yet making a connection with who she was.  Isabelle had just retired from a position at Millsaps that I always knew as Jack Woodward's office, so that's a pretty big connection there, but there was still a lot more I didn't know about yet.

Part of the writing workshop is reading to the other participant's pieces of what we're working on.  Sharing your work with other people doing the same sort of work is an important part of the creative process.  Isabelle's project is stories her mother told her about how her parents met during World War II in what became occupied Belgium.  As she told the story, my ears began to tingle.  Holy Shit, did James "Paddy" Hearon have a daughter I didn't know about?  James worked for my father for most of his life and took a special interest in me when it became clear that I was drowning in my professional life and struggling to find a place where I belonged.  

"Who was your father?" I asked.  "Robert Ezelle," she said.  I still wasn't making the connection.  I said that her story was so incredibly familiar to me that I knew a guy who had almost the same life story.  "James Hearon?" She said.  Her mother and James' wife Paulette knew each other and spoke frequently as the only two Belgians living in Jackson.  Then she said something about Mississippi Bedding, and the pieces started falling into place.  "Do you mean Bob Ezelle?"  I said.  I'd known her father and her brothers my entire life, but I had never heard the story of how her mother came from Belgium during the war.  

I'm ashamed to admit this, but sometimes little sisters get overlooked.  I always thought I tried not to do that, but I guess I missed one.  Isabelle's brothers were a huge part of Galloway Youth Ministries and a huge part of my youth.  They and the Gobers pretty much ran the place.  There's more to the story, though.  Part of our business at Missco was selling furniture for dormitories at schools and (unfortunately) furniture in prisons, and each of those furniture sets required a pretty durable mattress that we always bought from Bob Ezelle.  We laughed; even though Franklin Dorm is mostly used for storage now, I'm sure there are still a bunch of mattresses in it that came from Mississippi Bedding.  Our lives had roots that had interwoven for years, and because I'm sometimes completely socially blind, I had missed her.  Deciding to take this course in writing mended that.  Now that I've been given a second chance in life, I'm paying a lot closer attention to the trees around me, and this was one of them.

In The Lord of the Rings, it means something where there's a member of the Elven race in the woods.  They're this powerful class of being with magical forces that tie them deeply to the roots of Middle Earth, and their presence means something important is happening.

One of the first faces I picked out of the crowd when I attended the McMullin Writer's Workshop was Jeanne Luckett.  I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Jeanne Luckett was.  Even though she was considerably younger than my Daddy, he was incredibly impressed by her, not only because she was a Millsaps kid (which she was) but also because, on a professional level, she was involved in everything he thought was important, so throughout my life, whenever we would discuss these major campaigns going on, like the re-naming of First National Bank, or giving Millsaps a new look, or giving Missco a new look, her name was part of the conversation, and her work was not only evident but prevalent.  

To be honest, she always kind of intimidated me.  One of Daddy's business associates, whom I never got to fish with or drink with, was always kind of a mystery to me.  But I knew that everybody who knew her loved her, including some really important ones like Suzanne Maars and Rowan Taylor.  During the night, when Graphic Novelist Andrew Aydin lectured, I saw him talking with Jeanne.  Passing to my seat, I touched his elbow and said pretty cheekily, "Don't let her fool you; that's one of the most important marketing people in Mississippi history."  I meant it too, but I think I embarrassed her.  Having grown up at the feet of people who had remarkable careers, most of them didn't impress me with what they created, but she did.  Just driving around town, even now, I can look at things and say, "She did that.  She did that.  She did that too."

On the last day of the conference, I came early because I always try to go early to things now.  I spent so long not going to things at all that I figured I needed to start going early so I could catch up.  Going early, I had a chance to get Jeanne alone for a few minutes.  Talking like that, one on one for a good spell, really for the first time ever, I learned that our lives overlapped and intertwined in so many ways.  It means something when you love the same things and the same people, and that's something I share on so many levels with Jeanne Luckett.  For me, her face will still always mean that there's an Elven messenger in the forest, but now I'll always know this was someone who drank from the same well I drank from, someone whose history is part of my own.

One of the last things Ellen Ann Fentress said before I left at the end of the conference was, "Why don't you try putting together a short story."  I've always liked short stories, but I never thought I could write them, even though I've had some great teachers in short stories, including Austin Wilson and Suzanne Maars.  

Even though they ordered in some really great sandwiches from Broad Street for the conference, I made a tomato sandwich when I got home, just because we're rapidly running out of tomato sandwich season, and holding it over the sink to eat it so I don't get tomato seeds and tomato goo on my shirt, I started putting clay on the board and poking around at it with the idea of what sort of short story I could write.

Ray Bradbury's name came up over and over during the conference.  One of my peers, Kate, who was a very recent Millsaps Graduate, is taken with him too; she should be; he's Ray Bradbury.  One of the things Bradbury told me at the House of Pies, with Uncle Forry across from us, was that I shouldn't worry about writing, that I loved robots and dinosaurs, so I should be ok.  With that in mind, I started turning over ideas of robots and dinosaurs and rocket ships and Martians in my head, and what I heard was a whale song, and I knew I had my story.  

I've already written a crap ton this morning.  God knows if anyone will read this.  I have my idea for a short story.  Hopefully, I'll have at least the skeleton laid out by Monday.