Sins of the Father

In the larger world, we talk about the baby boom generation, generation x, and millennials.  In Mississippi, there's only one generational marker that matters:  Those of us who were in school when the order for segregation came and those who weren't.  That moment in history, that turning point of history, changed the future of Jackson and Mississippi and might have destroyed it.   

If you look at Jackson now and many other parts of Mississippi, you'll see a school system that's just about as segregated now as it was in 1970.  There are some white kids in black schools and some black kids in white schools, but for the most part, all of our schools are either almost entirely white or almost entirely black, with a fairly predictable outcome of underfunded black schools and overfunded white schools.  

White schools have buildings named for wealthy white benefactors (who usually paid for them) while black schools have buildings named for people who died for the cause, that were either paid for with what federal dollars trickled down to us, a bond issue Jackson can't afford, or they just renamed an older building that had been named for a white person, sometimes a Confederate hero.  

I'd like to report that successful middle-class and upper-middle-class black families stepped in and replaced the lost financial support of white people with their own financial support, but that's not happening.  Middle-class and upper-middle-class black families are, by and large, sending their kids to the same private schools the white parents send their kids to, but there are far fewer of them, so they end up being a small minority in their school that sits inside a city where people who look like them are actually the majority.

It's awfully easy to say, "Boyd, you were six years old.  You don't bear any responsibility in this." and there have certainly been times when I believed that.  I don't say that anymore.  These days, I tend to say, "If you're alive, and you live here or did your best to escape from here, then you bear some responsibility."  Leaving Jackson, leaving the Delta, even leaving Mississippi doesn't make you not responsible anymore; it just makes it easier to live like you weren't.  

Part of dealing with the sins of the Father is that you're left with some portion of what they left behind, just like they were left with the sins their Father left behind.   Breaking the cycle isn't easy, but until you do something different, you won't get nothing different.  Any generation can break the cycle.  They just have to choose it.

Reconciling Segregation Academies

Ellen Ann Fentress has a really cool project where she's illuminating the histories of Mississippians who attended the many "segregation academies" that arose at the end of the sixties and the start of the seventies.   I spent most of the twilight hours last night digging through it.  

When I was really too young to have their respect, I asked both Jesse Howell and Glen Caine about this.  The only thing I had working in my favor was they both knew I was the third generation of a family that had served Mississippi Schools since the end of the First World War.  Working against me, they knew I was on friendly terms with Bob Fortenberry, William Winter, Charlie Deaton, and Ray Mabus, and I might feel some sorta way about the schools that sprang out of segregation, and I did.  

I myself had gone to St. Andrews.  One of the few private schools in Mississippi that didn't spring out of the segregation wars.  One of the reasons I went to St. Andews was that the superintendent of Jackson Public Schools had told my grandfather that "Jim better get those boys into private schools because I don't know what's gonna happen."  He wasn't long before his retirement date, so I guess he felt some sort of freedom of speech in that.  He was also pretty involved in the efforts to keep Jackson Public Schools separate for as long as they were.  After he retired, we went through three or four superintendents until Bob Fortenberry decided to return to Mississippi and take on the task.  

Glen Caine was a lot more forthcoming with me than Jesse Howell.  Glen gave an awful lot of his time to Millsaps after his tenure at Jackson Academy, and I'll always have a lot of warm feelings toward him.  Both men told me the same thing.  Their goal was to create something like Memphis University School in Jackson, and there were many reasons to create a new school than just segregation.   I believe they were telling the truth, but I also believe we can't really hold MUS faultless in all this.   

They were both very determined that I know their school had no connection with the Citizens Council.   While that was true, it's also true that no white person in Jackson was very far from the Citizens Council.  In my studies of the time when Galloway UMC split in two, a lot of the names were members of the Citizens Council.  These were people I knew; some of them were people I respected and liked.  This is a very confusing history, one that will take a good bit more than the seventy years we've had to sort it all out.

I've heard many times the story of when Mr. Howell tried to buy land for the school from Mr. Westbrook and offered him a price, to which Mr. Wesbrook said, "If that's all you got, you better go talk to Gus Primos about some of that swampy land his dad bought in Rankin County," and that's what he did.  That's how Prep ended up where it is.  

I asked both of them why they built metal commercial buildings rather than conventional construction methods.  Their schools, in the early years, were basically warehouses with air conditioners.  Both of them told me the same thing.  That style of construction met their needs, both in terms of capital outlay and expedience and that's what struck me: why expedience? Why was there such a hurry to get the school built, and why didn't they have more time to build up their capital beforehand.  

I have an awful lot of respect for both of these men.  They educated a hell of a lot of people I know and did it well.  There's still a dangling sword in all this, though.  It may be that my generation can't really address this adequately, although Ellen Ann Fentress is trying to.  People like Cindy Hyde-Smith, clearly don't give a fuck.  There's also the issue of what taking 90% of the white kids out of the Jackson Public Schools did to the system that was left after and what responsibility we have to redress this.  In a lot of ways, Jackson Schools are as segregated now as they were in 1960, and it has an impact on the quality of education you can get in Jackson and the quality of life for the people who live here.  If a city can't offer quality public education, they might as well give up on attracting young couples to the city.  

The sins of the Father is a really complicated issue for Mississippians and not one we handle well.  It has a tremendous impact on the quality of life we can offer now too, even though we're all pretty old and the fathers are mostly dead.  I don't believe in the solution of moving everybody to Madison and Rankin County and starting all over.  I don't think that solves the problem; I think it moves it further down the road.  Sometimes moving the problem further down the road can make it much more formidable when you do face it.  

Admissions Project link below

https://admissionsprojects.com/

What Motivates Amanda

It's my hope that I can show you more than I tell you in my book, but since these are imaginary people, I have to decide what to tell you before I show it.  Although my characters are all imaginary, they all have qualities and histories that match people I've known in real life, but none of them have the same combination of qualities and histories as people I've known in real life.  It's kind of fun to say, "What if they're like John but with a father like Mary and a smoking habit like Tom?"   

Some of the faculty and administration do have pretty close to a one-to-one correlation with real-life people, like George Harmon and Lance Goss.  I even include Frank Hanes just so I can give him a happier ending.  None of them are exactly one-to-one, but they'll be recognizable.  None of the students or their parents match up with any living person in every aspect.  They're all amalgamations.  They're all imaginary and not meant to be taken as my opinion of any real person.

 Amanda Moore is eighteen.  At 5'8" she considers herself tall for a girl.  She'd much rather be six inches shorter.  She has light brown hair, with tremendous hazel eyes, and a few acne scars that aren't nearly as noticeable as she believes they are.  Most would say she was pretty, but she practices not looking friendly or approachable.  Her looks get her attention, and she knows how to work that, but her looks give her very little satisfaction or confidence.  

Other parts of her personality get in the way of her education.  Without that, she'd make a remarkable lawyer one day.  If she had any confidence, she could do just about anything, but despite the attitude she projects, she has none.  She's always done well in school because she was usually the brightest one in the class, but now that she's in a school full of kids who were the brightest ones in class, she's lost her seat at the table.  

Amanda is from Pascagoula, between Camille and Katrina, and before gulf coast gambling.  She's the only child of her mother, who was the second wife of her father, who now lives with his third wife, who is twenty years younger than him.  She has three half-brothers and sisters, including the four-year-old, that now gets all her father's love.  At four, he's decided that this will be the big strong son he always wanted, even though he's only four and still eats his boogers.

A modern psychologist would diagnose Amanda with Histrionic personality disorder.  Amanada's only ever seen one psychologist, a marriage and family counselor, ordered by the court when her mother sued her father for more support.  Since then, Amanda has refused to see any "head shrinkers," even after she started cutting her arms and thighs at fifteen.  Her mother, who is never sober after five o'clock, accepts Amanda's promise to "get help at school," even though her school counselor isn't a psychologist.  She's not even a counselor.  She's a nice Christian lady her private academy hired because she had an education degree and the right political attitude.  

Amanda has been experimenting with sex and drugs since she was fifteen.  A pretty girl can always get free drugs.  Sex gets her attention but never warmth, passion, compassion, or companionship.  Sex sometimes gets her better drugs and more of them.  

Amanda chose Marsh for college because her father and grandfather went there.  Her mother sees it as a chance for a new beginning, away from those nasty boys who she knew were leading her precious only child down the wrong paths.  Her mother went to community college.  She was her father's secretary before she became his mistress and would have probably remained his mistress had she not confronted Amanda's Father's first wife with a tremendous pregnant belly and some bad news.   Her father's first and second wives are now pretty good friends who mix a drink and call each other on the phone to talk about how much they hate the third wife and her stupid son.

Marsh College could be a fresh start and a new beginning for Amanda.  Her life could be very different, but she doesn't want that.  She wants more of what she had in Pascagoula, only this time with smarter boys, better drugs, and nobody to talk her ear off if she comes home four hours late.  

I'm trying to figure out ways that Amanda can eventually find happiness and peace later in life.  With all my characters, I'm telling the story of the moment but showing glimpses of both their past and their future.   That's kind of the point.  College isn't a destination.  It's a transitory point between the future and the past, even for the people who work there.  I'd like to say that what happens in the book is a painful moment that passes, and life becomes better; I just don't know how I'm going to do that just yet.  I'm not going to leave Amanda in the state she's in, though.  These are my creations, and I do have a fondness for all of them.  

Amanda will come off like a bitch, and somebody you don't want to be around.  It's my hope to show that she really never had a chance.  The cards were stacked against her.  Bradley tries really hard to find some good in her, but he's looking in the wrong places.  His attitude comes from an unstated belief that women are always good at heart, and men are always bad at heart, and someone like him has to mediate a safe place between them.  That's kind of the premise of being a gentleman, a myth Bradley believes more than he believes anything else and tries to apply in his life, but never with the results he hopes for.  People are never good or bad.  Their choices might be, but they themselves aren't.  Everybody tries to do good, even if they're wrong about what good is.

Amanda and Bradley, and Laurel aren't real, but I want to make them feel real.  That's one of the reasons why I'm setting them in a place that's very real, so real that some of my readers will recognize even the trees and the hills.  I'm not promising solutions to social problems.  This is just a story about people.  These are just observations about things that are in all people.  I'm not strong enough to shape a solution to what happens in the world, but I can maybe tell you about it.  I hope readers will see something they can sympathize with and understand in both the nicest and the meanest characters.  

Book Title

Since the action of my book takes place around a college production of Mid Summers Night Dream, I'm thinking of calling it "What Fools These Mortals Be" or some variation of it, maybe even just "What Fools."

This means I will spend the next few months reading criticism of the play to try and discover themes I can use that I hadn't already picked out on my own.  It's probably presumptuous to borrow a title from Shakespeare, but when Faulkner did it, it left an impression on me, so maybe it will have a similar effect if I do it.  You're also supposed to write what you know, and theater is something I know.

I constantly worry that if I write about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, even though they're imaginary, somebody will point out that I'm no prince either, and they'd be right.  That's the point, though.  I'm not writing about evil people.  I'm writing about ordinary people faced with situations that don't match any of the good and evil scenarios their parents taught them at a time when most young Americans got their morality from television, and on television, America's favorite dad was Bill Cosby.  

I have stories with a pleasant ending, but this isn't it.  The best I can say is that everybody survives by the last page.  Some learn from the experience.  Some don't.  I'm not even trying to teach my readers anything.  It's an image of an echo of a time.  I hope to make somebody care about what happens to my imaginary people, even if the imaginary people don't get what they want or even what they need.  

Dot Kitchings and the Keys to the Kingdom

I'm not yet ready to bury my past.  You'd be surprised how rarely people ask if I'm ready for anything.  Me being ready or not, has no impact on the progression of life.  

My sister called this morning to ask if I was going to the funeral for Dot Kitchings.  It's the same day as the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame induction for Jim Page, famed Millsaps Baseball coach.  I told her the logistics might be challenging, but I was going to do my best to do both but that I would be at the funeral for sure.

I don't much care for funerals.  In the years I was in the crystal cave, I attended none of them, missing even important ones.  A ritual celebrating the end of a remarkable life sometimes feels like just "the end" to me.  

When I look at St. Andrews now, it's grown so much from the school I knew.  They have all these really cool opportunities to build confidence and broaden horizons.  We didn't have that in the seventies.  One thing I learned as an adult was there were times when it was a struggle to keep the doors open and make the payroll.  We didn't have a lot of the impressive things the campus now boasts, but we did have people like Bea Donnelly and Dot Kitchings.

I entered Mrs. Kitchings' class, having been behind every year in language, history, and math.  Anything that required reading or writing, or calculation was a cold mountain for me, so I spent a lot of time in summer classes trying to catch up.

My mother suggested a trick using an index card to block out most of the text on the page of a book, so I could focus on just the one line I was trying to read.   That made a surprising difference.  Although I was behind, I went to the first day of Mrs. Kitchings's class, having read "The Hobbit," The Narnia Books, "The Martian Chronicles," and "I, Robot."  A girl I liked read "Slaughterhouse-Five" while I struggled with "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe."  I don't think she was showing off.  She was just lucky in an area where I was not.

I think Mrs. Kitchings understood that I loved reading; I just couldn't do it very well.  She taught us "The Foghorn." I explained the connection between "The Foghorn" and the movie "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" and how Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen were childhood friends, and I had written Harryhausen a letter.  

My problem came in two parts.  The reading part I'd made some progress on, but the writing part was still really a problem.  Some of my old teachers read these essays sometimes.  They have my great sympathy for ever having to read my handwriting on tests or papers.  I'm aware of how bad it is.  An awful lot of effort was put into improving it, but it proved fruitless.

One day, Mrs. Kitchings was talking to my mother and told her that the Education Center, right next door to St. Andrews, offered classes in typing.  Maybe I could attend class there one or two days a week.  If I learned to type, maybe my papers would be at least readable.  

Without realizing it, she handed me the keys to what would become my life-long passion.  Touch typing broke the link between my eyes and my fingers where dyslexia was confusing them.  Typing made me free.  Free in ways I never dreamed possible.  I had so much I wanted to express, even if nobody ever read it, that had been completely impossible before, and now I could not only do it, I could do it well.  I had never had the experience of doing anything well other than lifting weights in my life.  This changed everything.

Now in my sixties, I write between one and two thousand words a day, every day, even Sunday.  Dot Kitchings' idea made an entirely new person out of me.  It would still take a few years for what I could do to really manifest, but once I was through that door, I could do anything, and I got through that door because of her.  

I always sit in the back at funerals.  My face may not express that much emotion, but my tears do.  I'm not very good at saying goodbye, but I'm very good at remembering why I should.  

Quentin Compson Leaves Home.

Mississippi never leads nor follows.  It intensifies whatever fears and prejudices are already present in the larger society as if to say, "We can do it too," worried that, if we don't, we might be overlooked or forgotten about.   

"Do you hate blacks and queers?  We really, really hate them.    We'll prove it, and boy, will you be impressed.  Do you want to stop abortion?  We really want to stop abortion.  We'll do anything to stop it.  Boy, will you be impressed!"

It's not that we can't change, or be loving, or human.  We once tried to kill James Meridith, but now he walks those same streets as a hero.  People ask him to pose for a photo with their children.  It's almost as if we proved our point about integration; now, we can go back to being human again.  We never really hated the guy; we were just trying to show how dedicated we were to this idea, even though those who did lead were leading the entire country in another direction.     

Maybe, ultimately, it's a matter of confidence.  Maybe if we had more of it, we wouldn't be so determined to lead the way on the most prevalent negative emotions.   Maybe then we could say, "That's too much.  We don't want any part of that."

Yesterday we had a lecture from Donna Ladd, formerly the founder of the Jackson Free Press and now Editor of the Mississippi Free Press.   When I first started blogging, some of the people who now run very political blogs recognized me as having once been very political and tried to win me to their side by impressing me with how much they hated and disagreed with Donna.  Now that the face of journalism is changing, I worry that those same guys are having a much larger impact than they deserve.  That's not to say we didn't suffer from horribly biased news before, but for a while, we had almost liberated ourselves from that.  

Donna has launched more young writers than I've even met.  That makes her the perfect addition to the McMullan Young Writers program.  Donna's from Philadelphia, Mississippi.  She's just a couple years older than I am, and I was born in 1963.  If you think about what happened in Philadelphia in 1964, then you can't really blame her for feeling some sorta way about Mississippi.  

Those feelings made her want, more than anything, to escape Mississippi and never come back.  I know of a lot of people who had the same feeling, some really famous ones like Oprah Winfrey and Leontine Price, and Tennessee Williams.  Williams didn't go far, but in the 50s and 60s, New Orleans was an oasis of its own.  There were only a few places in the country where he could be what he was, New Orleans was one, and Mississippi was not.

At one point in her lecture, Donna asked the question that I spend a great deal of time thinking about.  "How many of you want to leave Mississippi when you graduate?"  More than half of the hands went up.  Some with energy and enthusiasm.  

I talk about this with my friends a lot.  "How do you keep your children here?"  So many of my generation face this.  Some of the young people in the forum that day were actually children of people I've known for a long time, raising their hands to say they want to leave Mississippi--to my mind, they want to leave those who love them more than anything.  I can't really blame them.  We invest so much treasure and time and energy and blood into raising these children, working so very hard to make sure they become remarkable people, and when they do actually become remarkable people, can we really ask them to stay here knowing that they might have to clip the wings we spent a lifetime giving them?

So much of what happened in Philadelphia that summer in 1964 touched my life.  Even though I was just learning to walk, it was so close to me.  My father always told the story of how the FBI called and wanted forty desk sets in forty-eight hours and how he struggled to fill the order.  Ben Puckett talked about the day the FBI called to rent equipment to dig up an earthen dam.  Clay Lee was a passionate young minister who the conference moved away from some pretty terrible things in Jackson, at Galloway, and sent him to a quiet country church where the troubles of Mississippi wouldn't upset his promising career, and they sent him to--Philadelphia Mississippi, just months before June of 1964.

I can't really blame Donna for leaving Mississippi.  We didn't exactly lay an appetizing table before her.  It's a miracle we ever got her back. 

When I was at St. Catherine's, I would have coffee with some guys, and one of them told the story of how they longed to leave Mississippi and see the world, and did, but when he saw in the newspapers that Rabbi Nussbaum's office and synagog were bombed, he figured he needed to go back to Mississippi.  He never hated Mississippi, but he never thought he'd get such a loud call to come back to her, either.

Many of Faulkner's characters spend a great deal of time turning over in their head what it means to be from Mississippi.  In Absalom, Absalom! my sometimes favorite novel, Quentin Compson struggles with his feelings about his home.  Throughout Faulkner's books, the Compsons often represent the moral heart of Mississippi.  Far from home, he says, “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”  I've never really had a Quentin Compson moment, but it's been close.  I've known a lot of people who did, though, and acted on it.  It's our own fault, really.  Everybody has a chance to make it better, but not everybody does. 

Photo Prompts

For my writing workshop today, we were assigned to bring in photo prompts for some free writing.  I have a folder on my phone of a couple hundred photos I use as prompts for drawing and painting.  These are images I don't know that much about, but I thought they looked cool.  I can write about that.  

Then I started thinking about maybe photographs where I do know the backstory.  Maybe those would be an even better writing prompt.  I chose two; one is of Bob Addams in front of the observatory.   I honestly could write an entire book about the observatory and the things that went on there, but if I did, there are people who wouldn't speak to me afterward.   Lately, though, I've been thinking it might be shocking if their children found out their parents did these things, so I shouldn't write about that, but their grandchildren will soon be old enough to think it was pretty cool.   I also really love Bob Addams.  

The other is a fairly famous picture of Ed King at the Woolworth sit-ins.  I picked that because I was born a month later.  Less than two years later, some thugs would run Rev. King off the road and forever change his face.  I never knew him before the accident.  He was quite handsome.  I don't remember a time when Ed King wasn't around somewhere.  He didn't rest after the sixties.  He stayed involved in everything, particularly everything I was involved in.  When I was an undergraduate, I'd see Ed show up at Millsaps, and I knew somebody was going to get a dressing down.  He didn't make many social calls, but when he felt like there was something going on, he addressed it.  A lot of guys from the Civil Rights Era were punished for it in the 70s and 80s.  Mississippi wanted very much to separate itself from its racist past, but Ed King was made chaplain of the University Medical Center, the biggest gem in the Mississippi higher education system.  I'm not really privy to how that decision was made, but it sent a very clear message.  

If my free writing is any good, I'll post it here.  I can produce words like mini muffins as long as I can type, but they're not all worth reading.  

The Quiet Crisis

Every coeducational college in the world secretly has a problem with rape.  They do a much better job now of educating the community about the problem, and that makes a considerable improvement, but it still happens.

It happens because you have a population of young people who are almost all away from home for the first time in their lives and living with almost no supervision for the first time in their lives.  Add to that lots of people using drugs and alcohol (sometimes for the first time) and lots of small enclosed spaces where couples can be alone, and it's a tinderbox.

There's also a problem in that sexual experiences can become social currency.  It's worse for boys, but girls do it too.  There also becomes a pretty serious problem where the accused is very popular, and the accuser is not.   That by itself can lead to serious problems with achieving a just outcome.

Even now, most rapes go unreported.  Girls blame themselves or don't want their private lives exposed, or for any number of other reasons, they choose to swallow this trauma rather than deal with it.  

George Harmon had an unwritten rule that if you were accused, you were gone.  It didn't matter if the boy was legally charged or convicted; he considered them a liability and didn't want them around.  If he considered a student to be a threat to the institution, he could be ruthless at getting rid of them.  Sometimes, the accused's lawyer would force his hand, and the school had to accept back a student who was accused but not charged or convicted.  

Another reason he wanted these people out of the community was that if somebody is accused of rape and then returns, there's a pretty good chance that somebody is going to take the girl's side and take a poke at the guy's chin.  That actually happened once.  I had to break it up.  

I'm thinking, more and more, that this sort of event might be the climax of my book.  I cover a lot of these issues, particularly that of the accused being very popular and the accuser being very unpopular.  I can write that kind of action pretty well, I think.  A fight can be an exciting thing to read.  It might also give the reader some sense that justice was served, even if it's really hard to tell if it actually was or wasn't.

Donna Tartt's first book dealt with a murder on campus.  Mine has a crime too, but considerably less dramatic.  I'm hoping that makes it feel more real.  

Journal July 14

I'm trying something different with my journal.  I can tell how many people read, so if nobody reads these, I'll go back to just keeping them to myself.

I went adventuring in Fondren tonight, using my motorized scooter.  I'm still hoping to eventually get to where I don't need assistance getting around, but that's proving slower than I had hoped.  

A new physical therapist is supposed to see me not next week but the next and work with me to figure out safe ways for me to use the leg press and the leg extension machine at Meridian Apartments.  If a leg press doesn't resolve my leg strength issues, I don't know what will.   Doing laps around my apartment in the wheelchair does a pretty good job of elevating my heart rate for aerobic fitness until I can use a stepper or something similar. 

My goal tonight was to find ramped access to everything I might be interested in entering in Fondren.  I found ramps to everything but Saltine.  I'm sure they have one; I just haven't found it yet. 

I've run thousands of bar tabs in my life, just not any in quite a while.  Getting a bourbon and branch at Fondren Public felt very comfortable and very familiar.    My doctor says I can have only one.  That's ok by me.  I exceeded my maximum allowance for spending the night obliterated long ago.  One slow one is just fine by me.

Rowan Taylor tried to teach me about really good whiskeys and bourbon.  My mother drank Cutty Sark, which I can't stand.   My dad drank Stolichnaya out of the freezer, sometimes with grapefruit juice if he was on a diet.

Eudora Welty drank either Maker's Mark or Old Crow.  That's fine by me.  If I'm just gonna have one, I'd like to have one with some local history to it.  

Fondren Public has a strong Cherokee Inn in the 80s kind of vibe to it.  From what I understand, it gets pretty lively after ten o'clock.  I, however, do not get very lively after ten o'clock, so I'll probably miss that.   There are three or four bars in Fondren, but this one's a pretty good fit.

I'm probably gonna have to haunt Hal and Mal's bar some.  I've spent many nights there with great music, sometimes commiserating with the local journalists and politicians.

A lot of my life was spent in bars, then after my divorce, I cut it off cold.  Part of it was that I knew my wife really liked bars as well, and I didn't want to make it awkward for her.  I can't spend my life avoiding exes, though.  There are too many of them.    

It took me a couple of weeks to adjust to living here, but I feel very at home now.  I'm still progressing, but it's a struggle to figure out what the pace is.  

I spent about six hours writing today, producing a little over 2,100 words.  Ray Bradbury says to aim for a thousand, so I figure I'm in the good.  Most of today was a conversation between my two main characters, discussing their positions on the main action.  At this point, they don't agree on the best way forward, which will become more of an issue as we go along.  

Even though that's not the point of the novel, I kind of want people to "ship" the two of them.  I don't think they'll end up together, but it'd be nice if people wanted them to if they were invested enough in these imaginary people I created to hope they find happiness.  

The thing about fiction is that all the characters are basically just the writer wearing different hats.  That's probably why most people think they're crazy and why so many of them spend their lives in a bottle.  I don't want to spend my life in a bottle.  I've known some really talented people who did, and I don't want to live that way.  Hopefully, I can create without lubrication.

I've spent a lot of time in bars with a lot of you.  I guess the point of today's journal entry is that those days are back, I guess, maybe in a measured sort of way.  I think that was inevitable.  

Product Review Skinny Pasta

In my quest to cut down on carbs and calories, I decided to try Skinny Pasta.  It comes in a bag, pre-cooked that you strain, then heat in the microwave for two minutes.  

A bag comes with a really generous portion. Boasting just 4.5 calories and 2g of carbs per serving, a bag has two servings or one big one.  Just add your favorite sauce and protein for a meal.  

It started to sound almost too good to be true.  At under $5.00 per serving, it really sounded much too good to be true.  It had good reviews, so I ordered the sampler pack of six bags to try.

It needed a little salt, but after that, the taste was really good. The texture is a little different from regular semolina pasta.  It's soft and has a good bite to it, but it's still a different texture that's different from al dente.  It's not bad, just different.  It doesn't have that almost airy texture that perfectly prepared al denta semolina pasta has.  

Its basic ingredient is Konjac, an Asian plant with a tubular root that is cooked to create a type of gelatin that can be shaped into different kinds of pasta.  

A same-size serving of traditional semolina pasta is 200 calories and 42g of carbs, so Skinny Pasta's 5 calories and 2g of carbs is quite a difference.  For me, it's worth the difference in texture.

Available at Amazon using the link below.  

https://amzn.to/46Ma9Hg

Defending My Novel

While I haven't actually been asked to do this, I'm constantly trying to defend my novel, at least to myself.  Why is it worth writing?  Why is it worth reading?  Is this worth doing?

In a college, you have all these different communities; there are the students, the faculty, the administration, the staff, the alumni, and the larger community of the city and the state that aren't in the college.  In a small school, something that happens to just a few people ends up felt by all of these different communities in different ways.

When I was a freshman, there was a woman who said she was raped by several boys, then she recanted, then she recanted again.  It was a pretty devastating thing, and I don't think anybody on any side was ever satisfied with the outcome.  My idea was to take that incident, but just that incident, change all the people involved in it, change the victim, change the accused, change the motivations, change the Greek organizations, change how and when it happened, but keep this idea of how having this really big thing hanging in the background is reflected differently in all of the communities, and maybe keep the time of year when it happened.  

In a story like this, there are a lot of social issues involved.  Issues of gender and class and justice, I'm even going to bring issues of race into it that weren't part of the actual events, but I don't want it to be a book about issues; I want it to be a book about people, about characters, not even the people involved in the main action, but all the people who try to live their lives while this goes on around them.  My two main characters have very different opinions about what happened and how to deal with it, and in the end, they arrive at very different places.  

I want to include ideas about mental health and what motivates people, and what impact actions have on their state of mind and sense of self.  

Although this will be a fictional story about a fictional place and fictional people, if you were ever at Millsaps, you'll recognize a lot of ghosts and memories.  If you were at Millsaps in the '80s, it will feel like a memory, even though it's not.  I tend to think of it that they filmed a movie of my novel and used Millsaps as the location.  

I think it's important that this takes place in the early Eighties because that's when traditional college students in the South were the first in their region, and often in their family, who never knew a segregated education system.  While I don't intend to deal with that directly, I do want to keep the notion that this is a new generation and a new chance at something different in our larger culture.  We were the children of the civil rights movement.  That much is very clear to me.  

Behind all that, there are the troubles in Ireland in a school where most of the students have Irish roots.  There's Reagan and Reaganomics and all the social changes that came with the Republican revolution.  We were also the first MTV to go to college.  There ended up not being many after us, so being MTV consumers at its inception ended up making us pretty unique.  

Because more of my training is in Theatre than in literature, I'm using the classical dramatic elements to build my story around. Point of inciting interest,  exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement.  I don't think I'm ready to do stream-of-consciousness or non-linear formats yet.  

I hope that I'll end up with something worth reading.  I hope I'll be able to create characters you are interested in and care about what happens to them, even if you don't agree with their actions.  I'm not out to expose anyone or beat a drum about any of the issues in the story, but to maybe show how these issues play out in a character's life and motivation.  People going off to college think they know everything, but reality soon hits them, and sometimes they find themselves in the middle of a storm.  My story is about people who find themselves in a storm, then find their way back out again.

Factor 75 Roasted Red Pepper Filet Mignon

Roasted Red Pepper Filet Mignon with Tortellini Primavera & Lemon Garlic Butter

This is a really good one.  They charge an extra $9, but it'd be twice that at a restaurant.  

You get a six-ounce filet, seared on the grill, then finished in the oven and served over a bed of roasted red peppers (bell peppers) with garlic.  Green and Red Bell Peppers are the same plants, but the red ones were allowed to ripen on the vine, giving them a more complex flavor.

The tortellini I really wish they'd serve just by themselves.  It was so good.  Served with a generous portion of herb butter spinach on top, this pasta could be a meal all by itself.  The pasta is made with brown rice flour to cut back on carbs.  I've yet to see them serve pasta made with semolina flour.

The only real drawback I can see is that you don't get to choose your cooking temperature on the steak, and I usually like mine rare to medium-rare, and this came medium-well.    The extra cooking time didn't damage the taste or the texture of the beef, though.  It was almost tender enough to cut with a fork. 

Nutrition Per Serving
Calories                    570kcal
Fat                            32g
Saturated Fat            12g
Carbohydrate            27g
Sugar                        6
Dietary Fiber            4g
Protein                    42g
Cholesterol            155mg
Sodium                    780mg

Use my link when ordering from Factor 75 and get a significant discount.

https://www.factor75.com/plans?locale=en-US&c=HS-26VKT8M3A&utm_campaign=clipboard&utm_source=raf-share&utm_medium=referral

Broken Promises

My parents worked pretty hard to instill several important lessons in me.  Some I picked up on better than others.  One was that I should always try to be useful and always try to help other people.  That was reinforced pretty heavily when I went to Boy Scouts or Sunday School.  The message was pretty clear.  You're here to have a positive impact on other people.  It might be more important than anything else.

When I was much younger, one of the things that made me really uncomfortable and unhappy was that it was really common for people to make social, even romantic, connections with me just because they thought I could help with their job or some other financial aspect of their lives.  

The end result was a situation where, whenever I met somebody, I'd wonder why they were there and if they really had any interest in me or were they just acting like it so I'd help them out.  The times when that did become a problem, it was almost impossible to tell if somebody was genuine or not, and I made several mistakes when I trusted somebody who was not.  

I don't know that I really blame them, though.  In your twenties, life is kind of a survival game.  Nobody is in a very stable situation, and taking a shortcut here and there can be very tempting, especially if your situation is really upside down and dire.  I don't think anybody ever set out to hurt me.  I think they just got desperate and saw me as a solution to their problem and didn't care enough not to hurt me.  

It was particularly bad with people who struggled with addiction issues.  With an addict, you're dealing with two people.  One is normal and moral and usually really nice, and the other is an animal out to survive however it can, which sometimes meant me.

Closing Time

 In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Scrooges in Jackson was as close to Cheers as you'll find.  They even had a plaque from the guy who owned the real Cheers in Boston saying so.  It was official.

Today we buried a regular soldier from that campaign.  In among the high school friends, church friends, and family were Norm and Cliff and me.  In the hip-hop culture, there's a tradition of pouring out a beer for a friend who died too young.  We all die too young.  Some of us have had more beers than others, poured out or not.

Scrooges began when Billy Neville wanted to move his clothing business.  It wasn't a square lot, so they designed a structure with two large retail spaces but ended up with sort of an odd-shaped leftover space in the corner.  Since he was making his business an old English haberdashery, he had the idea of using this odd-shaped corner as an old English pub.  While the building was going up, he traveled to England and bought furniture for both his shop and this idea he had for a pub, including authentic English pub booths.  He soon found out that American asses must be deeper than English asses, so he had them modified to be about six inches deeper.  

Mississippi had been "wet" for a few years, and there were bars in Jackson, Cherokee being one, but there weren't any of what Neville considered "nice" bars.  Scrooges was the first.  He thought running a bar would be easy; everybody does.  It's not.  Pretty soon, he sold the bar to an ambitious young restaurant manager named Bill Latham.  

Bill owned Scrooges through its golden years, parlaying that success into a venture called "Amerigos" and another one called "Char," but also the ill-fated Wild Bills Caddilac Grill.  The bar changed hands several times after Bill, but it never regained the status it once had.

There's something to be said for sitting next to a guy for twenty years.  Some people at bars are really good at socializing.  Some of us prefer to sit in the corner; the great thing about a place like Scrooges (or cheers) is there's room for everybody.

Factor 75 Summer Squash Medly

 Summer Squash Medley with Pimento Cheese & Roasted Asparagus

This is one of my favorite meals yet, and check out the 120 calories.  It comes with a generous portion of Zucchini and yellow squash topped with a really tangy pimento cheese sauce.  They really don't skimp with the portions.  This meal weighed in at a respectable 11 ounces.   Freezing and canning squash can ruin its texture, but these have never been frozen or canned, so they still have that farmers market fresh texture.  There's a healthy portion of chopped asparagus with herb butter sauce.  

Not vegan, but vegetarian, this meal is a little low on protein, so pair it with a chicken breast. All the other nutritional numbers look great!

Nutrition Per Serving

Calories                120kcal
Fat                        10g
Saturated Fat        4g
Carbohydrate        5g
Sugar                    3g
Dietary Fiber        2g
Protein                3g
Cholesterol           15mg
Sodium                190mg

Use my link to get a great discount

https://www.factor75.com/plans?locale=en-US&c=HS-26VKT8M3A&utm_campaign=clipboard&utm_source=raf-share&utm_medium=referral

Mushroom, Tomato & Goat Cheese Cavatappi

 Mushroom, Tomato & Goat Cheese Cavatappi with Herb-Roasted Zucchini

Tonight's meal is a meatless selection from Factor 75.  It’s vegetarian, not vegan; it’s also my favorite so far.

Done well, I prefer good mushrooms to medium-quality meat, and these were done well.  This is the second dish I’ve gotten served over a cauliflower-based cavatappi, again trying to make your carbs count.  If you’re shooting for less than 300g of carbs per day, this entire meal is only 44g.

Goat cheese is a factor in weight loss in that it’s digested more easily than cow’s cheese.  It can also have the effect of making you feel more full than cow’s milk cheese.   The main reason to use goat cheese, though, is its tangy fresh goodness.  I’d put goat cheese on anything.

This is the second time I’ve had a dish with their Herb-Roasted Zucchini as a side.  Side dishes can be carb and fat bombs, Factor 75 wisely spends those calories in the main dish while making the side dish still very enjoyable.  It might have been on two meals this week because zucchini is in season.  Using seasonal vegetables is a very good sign.  

With good mastication, it took about thirty minutes to prepare and eat tonight’s meal.  That’s two minutes for heating and twenty-eight for enjoying.  With wine and a dinner partner, this could easily stretch to an hour.  At 440 calories and a good time, you can’t go wrong.

Nutrition Per Serving Per Serving

Calories         440kcal
Fat         23g
Saturated Fat 12g
Carbohydrate 44g
Sugar 13g
Dietary Fiber 6g
Protein 15g
Cholesterol 105mg
Sodium         890mg

I have been heating up flavorful, filling food with Factor for some time now, and I thought you’d want in too. Sign-up with my personal link and you will get up to $150 off your first boxes. 

https://www.factor75.com/plans?locale=en-US&c=HS-26VKT8M3A&utm_campaign=clipboard&utm_source=raf-share&utm_medium=referral

Per aspera ad Astra

 Nero ruled Rome from 54 to 68.  For those of us born in the sixties, that's quite a number.  He was generally considered a horrible person.  Besides feeding Christians to lions and setting fire to Rome, and blaming the Christians, Nero also ordered the suicide of his mentor, the philosopher Seneca.  Nero accused Seneca of taking part in a plot to overthrow and murder him.  To this day, historians argue whether or not the charges were false.  If Seneca had a part in the plot, it wasn't a large one.

In the first century, stoicism dominated Roman philosophy.  Stoics pondered such things as the nature of matter, happiness, virtue, divinity, and more.  Their influence on what was to become Christian thought is unmistakable; even though Seneca spoke about Christianity and Judaism, he was a pagan and a pantheist.

Seneca was known for his poetry.  He had a remarkable way with words.  One of my favorite thoughts from Seneca was "Per aspera ad Astra."  It's now part of official Star Trek lore, which is what started me thinking about it.

By "aspera" challenges, difficulties, struggle, effort, and resistance, we achieve "Astra" the Stars.  Through hardship, we reach the stars.  The Romans didn't have a very clear idea of what the stars actually were, so, like many cultures before them, "the stars" became an idea, the highest accomplishment, or the greatest goal.

We get the word "exasperate" from "aspera."  Considered a Southern expression, our use of exasperate probably comes from the 19th-century Southern obsession with romanticism and classical philosophy.  A fairly common practice among Southerners was to name slaves after classical figures, both real and mythical.

This idea that we reach the stars through hardship resonates with what I've been going through for the last two years.  I had to get really, very near death before I flipped the switch and started becoming something much greater than I had ever been.  Robert St. John tells a similar story.  He had to come very close to destroying himself to ultimately become himself. 

You see the influence of "Per aspera ad Astra" in Christian thought.  There are a number of instances where Christians advise perseverance in the face of adversity as the only path to a higher place.

In Star Trek, they take the ad astra part as quite literally the stars around us.  The real world isn't quite there yet; we have to make do with our one star.  Seneca's thought remains valid and strong though.  Through struggle, we become much more than what we were.  

Factor 75 Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken Fusilli

Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken Fusilli with Italian Herb-Roasted Zucchini

One thing I've noticed about the Factor 75 foods is they really like to be flexible and creative with the pasta they use.  Fusilli is a spiral-shaped Italian pasta.  Pasta is made in different shapes because increasing the surface area gives more places for the sauce to cling, increasing your flavor profile. This particular dish uses Lentil flour to make its pasta rather than wheat flower.  Lentils are tiny beans, and they make pasta with the same texture as wheat pasta but with more protein and more fiber, basically more bang for your carbs.

You get about 2/3 of a boneless, skinless chicken breast cut up into the dish.  You don't miss having more chicken as it's about eight ounces of food.  It's seasoned with basil, oregano, and garlic and then covered in a generous portion of the cream, sun-dried tomato sauce.  

Like with my last review, the zucchini side dish was generous.  Normally you'd expect chefs to just load it down with salt and butter and call it a day, but since they're choosing to spend their fat ounces on the main entry, there's hardly any fat at all, so they make up for it by really developing a garlic-centered flavor profile.  It's a generous portion and really very good.

They recommend you not freeze your meals, although you could.  From a cold but not frozen state, they recommend you microwave it for two minutes, which gets the meal very warm, almost too hot to take the cover off, but doesn't overcook the pasta or the meat.

Summary: Of the two meals I've reviewed so far, this was my second favorite, but still very good.  I'd have no problem serving this to an important guest.  It's flavorful and filling and under 500 calories, which is important to me.  You get 28 grams of protein, which is just two grams less than a Premier Protein shake.  

     Nutrition
1 serving - 12.4 total ounces.  

Calories            490
Fat                    27g
Saturated Fat    12g
Carbohydrate    36g
Sugar                9g
Dietary Fiber    6g
Protein              28g
Cholesterol      130mg
Sodium            900mg

Sign up with Factor 75 with this link for a generous discount

Women Who Don't Celebrate Holidays

 Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are big fans of the idea that a "good guy with a gun" is all you need to solve the problem of "bad guys with guns."  They believe in it so much that they plaster it all over their social media every time it works.  

That's the problem; every time it works is between one and two percent of all the gun violence in the nation.  One or two percent make their evidence in this argument almost anecdotal.  While it does work at some level, their strategy simply isn't solving the problem.

Usually, their social media post will go like this: Larry Smith takes out Rico Warez with the AK47 he kept in the back of his truck in case he wanted to go deer hunting.  Their posts are filled to the brim with racial dog whistles. Then 500 middle-aged men will comment how great it is to be an American and FU Brandon!  

Problems like gun violence amplify problems with economic disparity.  The darker and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be the victim of gun violence.

Going to the grocery today, I was struck by what a terrible job we do of governing the people who live here.  Morgan Place is so filled with potholes you can't navigate it with a normal vehicle.  Inside the grocery, the women at the deli counter were talking.  I suppose the topic before I walked up was why they're working today (July 4).  One of them said she didn't mind working on the fourth because that's when her cousin got shot, and her family doesn't celebrate it, and the other woman said she felt the same about Christmas because that's when her daddy got shot.  

Two women, Americans both Mississippians and Jacksonians, laid out a testimony before me of what a horrible job we've done of governing the world they live in.  By "we," I mean me too!  There certainly have been thousands of times when I could have done more, said more, and tried more to make things better but didn't.  

Our city has an administration that was elected on the premise that they could and would do something about economic disparity, but they've done such a shit job at maintaining the basic functions of a city that they've actually made the effects of economic disparity much worse.  Our state has a decidedly conservative legislature and administration, by word, absolutely devoted to providing security to its citizens but failing utterly for these two women.  Both ends of the political spectrum made promises to help these women, and both failed.  Their lives are bad and getting worse.  

I think we have to admit that conservative gun policies are a failure.  I think we also have to admit that liberal policing policies are also a failure.  I think we have to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate everything we're doing and look for solutions to the problem rather than ways to protect our empire of ideas.  

It's not fair that these women have to work on July fourth while I get to fuck around and do what I want.  It's also not fair that in one of the world's most advanced countries, we can't keep that woman's father safe on Christmas Eve or the other woman's cousin safe on the Fourth of July.

Writing for my Love

It’s been about a year since I started letting the world read my daily journals or significant parts of them.  I began writing them forty-five years ago, or more, then one day, when I was still too weak to sit up in bed, I thought, “I really should let people know I”m alive,” and started posting extensive excerpts from my journal on Facebook.  

It’s been a fascinating process.  The response has been truly overwhelming.  Having kept all this hidden for so long, I had no idea I could get anyone to read me unless I wrote about big things like dinosaurs and spaceships, like some of my idols.  

Earlier today, the question arose about what the women in my life thought of my writing.  The answer is pretty simple: they didn’t know anything about it.  Some knew I was doing it, but since I said it was my journal, and none of them knew how to find things on my computer, none were ever read.  

I’d only ever planned for there to be one woman in my life.  Instead, there were like twelve.  I think part of the problem was that I was never very honest with them, not nearly as honest as I am with the people who read my blogs.  I think that was a vital mistake.  Even if being more honest wouldn’t have kept any of them in my life, it was still the moral thing to do.  

I always tried to project that I was a counter to whatever challenges were in their life. No matter how storm-ravaged their existence, I was indomitable and immutable, and I could form an impenetrable barrier between them and whatever was hurting them. That’s a lie, of course. I could keep it up for a while, but not forever, and let’s be honest, once the storm passed, it made me obsolete.  Maybe, if I’d shown them the things I write in the hours when the sun struggles over the horizon, it would have opened up a new era of understanding.  Maybe I would have proved more valuable in the long run.

There was one woman; her name means “honey” in an ancient tongue.  She was the only woman I ever courted who knew me from work.  Not from Missco or the ABoyd Company, but from my real work, in this instance, theater and painting.  We played chess and drank coffee and discussed many things.  I don’t know that giving her access to my journals would have changed the trajectory of our lives, but I would have deeply valued her perspective on what I wrote.  I’m really a bit angry with myself, now that I think of it.  

She had the voice of an angel.  Her hands were tender, and her eyes shown brighter than the moon, but I missed having such a brilliant critic and soundboard available before the ink dried on my copy.  We were so horribly star-crossed, I don’t think anything could have made us end up together, but imagine what a difference learning that other people wanted to read my words would have made if I had trusted her to read them.

There’s another woman.  I write about her often.  She had a gigantic smile and bushels of blonde hair, and the world would have thought she was the most cheerful person in it while she was flaying the skin from her own bones in secret and doing whatever she could to numb the pain from it.

That was almost forty years ago, but even now, I feel genuine pangs of guilt for not clearing a path out of the tangled morass of rose thorns she surrounded herself in.  Saving her wasn’t my job, but it was the only thing I wanted to do, and it’s still the one thing I wish I had accomplished that I didn’t.  People tell me all the time that this wasn’t my responsibility and what happened to her wasn’t my fault, but no, that’s a scar that I’ll carry on my back until the day they close my eyes for good.

My plan was to show her that I was stronger than anything that happened to her, stronger than anything she might do to herself, and all she had to do was be calm and let me pull her out of the cutting weeds that grew around her.  That failed. It failed utterly.  

Maybe, if I’d shown her my words, maybe if I’d let her see that I saw and felt the same darkness, the same cold and isolation that she felt, that maybe we could have made a connection there, and maybe somehow knowing she wasn’t alone in what she was feeling might have made her hold on to herself long enough to climb out of the hole she was in.  

I’m aware that I’m describing a scenario where I might have found a way to succeed at something I failed at, and not a scenario where someone from my past would have wanted to stick around and be someone in my present, but it’s really hard to twist my mind to thoughts of what I need.  I don’t think that’s going to change.  At least, in this one instance, the world would have been just a little better if I’d won this battle I fought for somebody other than myself.  

Although I’ve had all these other people playing that role in my life, there’s just the one woman I ever really loved.  We met as children, young enough that we got to see each other’s body change and grow tall.  

Her hands were slender and strong.  Her eyes were the deepest brown, like staring into your coffee and seeing the world reflected in it.  She took my arm many times and escorted me whenever there was a fine thing I had to attend, but I never once tried to express to her how special she was to me.   Asking her might mean she’d reject me, and as long as I didn’t ask, I could always tell myself, “It might have.”  Fifty years later, “it might have” means nothing to anyone but me.

The funny thing is, she studied literature.  While it’s not what she ended up doing for a living, it’s something that was dear to her and important to her.  Imagine what might have happened if I had said, “Hi, these are my words.  I’d really like to know what you think of them.”  Imagine the impact of arranging a meeting between the thing I loved the most and the girl I loved the most.  It was impossible, of course.  I wasn’t willing to show my words to those who didn’t matter; showing them to someone who did matter would have been such a huge risk.  I would have fainted from the anticipation.  

Some of my former dance partners read my words here. Sometimes they ask questions and clarifications of a point. I haven’t yet gotten into trouble for revealing something I shouldn’t have. I try to be sensitive.  I have been scolded for not saying this or that twenty years ago.  That’s to be expected.  I do choose my words differently, knowing someone might read them.  That’s also to be expected, but I try to retain the candor I had when I was writing for myself.  

If I could tell a younger version of me something, I’d tell him to be honest. Trust that people want to see the truth. You can’t be strong enough to heal the world. Its enemies are stronger than your arms, no matter how strong you make them.   You hide this precious thing every day, thinking the world has no interest in it.  You’re wrong; your words are what the world made you for.  

Factor 75 Cavatappi & Italian Pork Ragu

 This is my first meal with the Factor75 program. The meals come cold but unfrozen in a box, a week's worth at a time. I chose the “calorie smart” and “protein plus” menus. I’m starting with the six-meals-per-week plan. There are several other options. With shipping, that’s $98.37 for six meals, $16.40 per meal.

Tonight's meal was cavatappi, which is a type of spiral pasta, and Italian pork ragu with steamed broccoli. The meals come in plastic trays with two wells. It’s hard to gauge the size of the portions from looking at the trays because the wells are pretty deep. The portions were generous, though, and by the time I finished eating both wells, I was pretty full.

The meal was 490 calories, with 26g of fat, 23g of protein, and 43g of total carbs. If you’re using Noom, it’s already listed in the meal options.

This is their image. I’ll start making my own as I write more of these.

Microwave pasta isn’t always great, but this was perfect. The Ragu was flavorful but not too meaty. I guess they have to do a balancing act to keep the calories at their goal. It ended up being a generous portion. I was full when I finished it.

The steamed broccoli was steamed broccoli. They had a garlic sauce with a little butter, which I would have preferred a whole bunch of butter, but they’re trying to economize calories, and so am I. Green vegetables like this cost almost nothing on Noom, so I could have eaten three times as much without going over my budget, but what they sent was more than adequate.

For $14 and two minutes in the microwave, I’d say it’s worth it. That’s less than I’d spend at a restaurant for about the same quality, and more than I’d spend at a fast food place, with much greater quality.

They made a real effort to make sure their shipping boxes were recyclable and biodegradable, so maybe the meal trays are next.

Use this link and get a $150 discount on Factor75 food.  

Lee and Agamemnon

 In Lee: The Last Years, Flood quotes one of the "KA Five" as saying of Lee that "We likened him unto Agamemnon."  I always found that strange because things didn't end well for Agamemnon.

For a white Southerner, college-educated in the nineteenth century, it's not at all surprising that they read and studied the Illiad.  Agamemnon, drawing the Greeks together for this great cultural and political, and military adventure, probably did remind him of his service under Lee, both as a soldier and as a student.  

Apparently, whoever taught Greek literature, at Washington College, after the war, didn't include the Orestian Trilogy in their lessons.  Agamemnon's life may have been the origin of the Greek State, but his death was the origin of Greek justice.  Their professor only told them half the story.

Unlike Robert E Lee, who I'm absolutely certain was real, I'm not at all convinced that Agamemnon was ever a real person.  If he was, I can't imagine his real story matching up to the myth at all.  That's not what myths are for.  

Myths create stories that explain societies.  Sometimes they build up over many years, and disparate stories are combined and remade to fit the narrative the culture builds.

Every culture needs two creation stories.  The first is a metaphysical story.  The earth was a woman, and the sky was her husband.  The gods came as horses rising from the foam of the sea.  The Greek stories of metaphysical creation are fascinating and beautiful.  

They also need a myth about their political creation.  In Judaic culture, that's Joseph and Abraham, and Moses.  These are stories about what sets our people apart from other people.  They are vital in creating a cultural identity.  For the Greeks, the Illiad serves this purpose.  The Greek culture created itself with a story about defeating Troy, fighting over their ideas about the honor of a woman.

There are other very important myths, though.  Myths about where our cultural values come from.  In the bible, you have stories about Cain and Abel sewing the seeds of ideas about justice.  That's what the death of Agamemnon and his son's quest for redemption does for the Greeks.  It creates and describes in them the idea of Justice and just redemption.

It's entirely possible that the myth about Agamamemnon's life and Agamemnon's death was originally two entirely different people that were merged together into one story.  I think that happened a lot.  

Lee's political campaign might have created the political culture of the South, even though he lost the war, but there's been a much longer struggle for justice to come out of the Civil War, one that we're still fighting today.  I can't really say that Lee was part of that battle.  His purpose after the war was to get these boys, who had been his soldiers, prepared to be productive citizens again.  The question of Justice in the South would not be answered in their generation.  I'm very much starting to doubt that it will be answered in mine.

Education is a funny thing.  You can't ever really fit a complete understanding of any subject into any one lifetime, even if what you're trying to understand happened thousands of years ago.  Whoever taught the KA five about the Illiad didn't mention what happened to Agamemnon when he got home.  That was a pretty serious omission. 

 

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Mississippi Airplanes

 For guys in my dad’s generation, for those who were also from here, there wasn’t much more impressive than an airplane.  Some, like his cousin Ben, went for sailboats instead.  Sailing has the advantage that you don’t fall to your death if the wind goes out of your sails, but you may end up shark food, so it’s a trade-off.

Part of this phenomenon might have been driven by wanting to impress people that there was something more to them than just another country boy, and a machine that can actually fly is a pretty good way to do just that.  In some cases, it was a thing that their parents had only read about.  It’s hard to imagine what that would be like today.  I guess my father never dreamed of such a thing as a submersible that went to the Titanic, so if I got one, it’d be impressive to him, although apparently ill-advised.

Bob Neblett was the first weatherman in Mississippi on the first television station in Mississippi.  He was a weatherman because he was also one of Mississippi’s first private pilots.  Besides doing the news, he was in charge of Mississippi’s only airport, Hawkin’s Field, out by the zoo.  Today, pilots check their phones for weather reports before going out.  Neblett didn’t have that available to him, and NOAH didn’t send out weather reports on the wire, so he learned basic meteorology himself.  When WJTV went on the air, Bob was the only choice.  He also sold ice cream and introduced Mississippians to Reddy Kilowatt.

Serving in the ROTC, my dad wanted very much to be a pilot.  He was in ROTC, so when he went into the service, he would be an officer.  His father insisted.  He was completely ready to fight the Nazis in World War II, but it ended before he graduated, so he served in Korea.  The airforce said he was too tall for a pilot, but he could be an engineer, so they sent him to school to learn this fancy new thing they had called “radar,” and he spent his entire military career listening for Russians flying over the border into West Berlin, and learning the specs of every aircraft on the base.

Most of Dad’s friends were as plane obsessed as he was.  When Brum Day ascended at Trustmark, Trustmark got an airplane.  My uncle Boyd loved trains.  He was part owner of a railroad in North Mississippi for a while, and Missco had a sleeper car they could attach to the City of New Orleans for trips to Chicago and beyond.  When my dad took over, the sleeper car was replaced by a Beechcraft King turboprop airplane.  The first of three, each one a seat or two bigger than the last.  His last aircraft had previously belonged to Roy Clark, the singer, who traded it for a jet.

There are scary moments with airplanes.  The Missco plane was hit by lightning twice and by geese several times.  Ben Puckett, one of his best friends, was flying out of Hilton Head when they crashed and killed six passengers, including Roger Stribling.  Ben had a broken back, and it took him months to recover.  One of Roger’s daughters was in my class.  The idea that this could have been my family was very clear to me.

Not rated to fly a craft the size of a Beechcraft King, my dad had to hire a pilot.  A retired WWII pilot named Tony Staples came highly recommended.  Tony was a square-shouldered, steel-eyed gent with shocking white hair.  

Tony was the most fastidious guy I ever knew.  He was so good at taking care of airplanes that each of our airplanes sold for more than what we paid for them.  While his voice had great power, he used a very controlled tone.  This is a trait often found among pilots whose lives depend on radio communications.

Tony, very conspicuously, wore a gold Mason’s ring.  From what I understand, he never missed a meeting.  He talked to me about it a few times but never pressured me to join.  I was interested because there were several Freemasons in my family, but never joined.

One of my favorite stories about Tony is that once, we were stopped at a small airport for fuel, and inside the fuel center were four young men wearing denim and t-shirts but with their faces painted in elaborate designs.  We assumed they were clowns and avoided them.  Tony never met a stranger and struck up a conversation with the boys and came back reporting that they were a band, and their gimmick was that they never appeared without their makeup.  He even bought one of their albums.  Showing me the album, I could see the artwork of the same four boys in makeup and the words “KISS” on top.  I always heard they did pretty well after that meeting.  

When my dad died, the man who took over his position hated flying, so it was clear the days of our airplane were numbered.  They were having a pretty terrible year and hoped this infusion of cash would improve the bottom line.  Tony had retired, but the new pilot passed me in the hall.  “They’re selling your daddy’s airplane.”  He said.  The comment was more potent coming from him because it meant he was out of a job.  “Things are changing,” I said.  Things are really changing.

Broken Fire Hydrant

 Last night on the news, they interviewed a woman who had a fire in her neighborhood, but the Firemen couldn’t find the hydrant, and when they did find it, it didn’t work.  The firemen fought the blaze for hours without a source of water and prevented this one-house fire from taking over the neighborhood.

I was struck by the abject poverty of this woman and her neighbors.  I’ve seen neighborhoods like this before, but I don’t get that many opportunities to talk to the residents.  

Some people would say, especially in Mississippi, say that her subculture and her race are what made her this poor.  While there’s no evidence that race has this effect, whoever you are, whatever you become, your subculture has a lot to do with it.  

No subculture is perfectly logical or perfectly successful.  My subculture makes me read books I don’t understand (looking at you, James Joyce.)  Her culture has given her all the tools necessary to live in abject poverty but hasn’t provided her a path out of it.  Even though my city has an administration that’s more attentive and generous to people on her end of the economic spectrum than ever in the history of Mississippi, we still failed her, and we don’t have a clear path to improving things for her.  If not for some inventive firemen, her entire neighborhood could have been destroyed.

Ivan Allen made more money in the Office Supply business than anyone in the history of stationery.  He was also a brilliant statesman.  Allen had a theory that went something like this:  all of our boats are tied together–the greatest and the smallest.  When the tide comes in, my boat cannot rise to its potential unless this poor woman whose house burned down has a boat that’s allowed and encouraged to rise too.  No matter how seaworthy my vessel is, I’m never going to reach my potential unless I take her with me.  There’s no way to stay here and cut the ropes.

A lot of people choose not to stay here.  You have to go pretty far away, though.  You can’t just go to Madison or Brandon and expect to escape the cycle of poverty; you have to leave the state, and sometimes you have to leave the South.

We have a responsibility to improve all of our citizens, starting at birth.  In Mississippi, we don’t do such a great job of that.  Unless we improve the lot of the poorest and weakest born to us, the strongest can never reach their potential.  

The woman on television said she’d lived in Jackson all her life.  I believe her.  She was the product of the Jackson Public Schools and all the organizations we have and create to improve our citizens, and we didn’t do such a great job with her.  We can do better.  A great society recognizes the necessity to improve every child born within its borders.  We don’t do such a great job of this, but we can do better.  

Surrender at Appomattox

 Through my association with Kappa Alpha Order, I’ve been given or otherwise accumulated five portraits of Robert E. Lee.  As per KA tradition, they are all post-war portraits of Lee.  One was immediately post-war.  

I haven’t displayed them for years.  They sat quietly in a closet, wrapped in butcher paper.  After what seemed like one hundred KA Conventions and spending two years raising money for a massive renovation of the Alpha Mu house, I felt like, whatever I owed KA, I had given.  I appreciated Dick Wilson and Doug Stone's effort and time invested in KA, but I didn’t want to do that.  I felt like there were other things to come in my life.

Many of my peers focused on the Confederate part of Lee’s life.  There were Confederate flags and Confederate uniforms everywhere.  In the South, having a relative who served in the war was considered a badge of honor.  I have a grandfather who served in the Mississippi Regiment.  My brother has his musket.  

The boys who created KA saw things differently.  They served under Lee in the four years before.  Like Lee, they were officially considered traitors in the eyes of the United States Government.  Lincoln had spoken of a pardon for Lee, but an assassin's bullet stopped that.  

Having followed Lee into battle, these boys didn’t know what to do with their lives.  Most of Virginia was destroyed, and what wasn’t ruined by fire was devastated by the massive economic depression that followed the war.  Lee taking the job as president of Washington College gave them some direction in life.  They would pick back up the studies they left behind when the war started.  

What these boys wanted was not to glamorize or memorialize the war.  They wanted to be citizens again and rebuild their ruined homes, and they saw Lee’s guidance as the best path to do that.   They didn’t want to be Confederates again; they wanted to be Americans.

Lee surrendered his commission because he felt that Virginia was in danger.  He was right.  Union troops marched over every inch of Virginia.  He’d only ever been a military man, and now he couldn’t do that.  The offer of a job at Washington College would be similar to the position he performed at West Point.  He was very grateful for the opportunity.

The Confederate War was a fool’s errand.  We lost nearly everything in it.  At Appomattox, Lee had many advisings not to surrender.  His men wept when they saw him riding off on his horse, Traveler, to meet Grant.  

Lee knew that surrender would save lives no matter how horrific Grant’s terms might be.  The Confederate cause was lost, not that it ever had much chance.  Grant was gracious and generous.  The men left the meeting with respect for each other and respect for their men.

As Lee left the courthouse to return to his men, the Union soldiers lowered their hats as he passed.  There were no photographs of the event, but an artist named Alfred Waud captured some of the events with gesture sketches.  

One of these sketches, the one of Lee riding Traveler away from the courthouse, with the Union soldiers doffing their hats, was given to me by my cousin Robert Wingate.  I framed it and hung it in my home for many years.

In my new home, I think I’ll store all the other portraits of Lee, even the ones of Lee and Traveler, but hang this one.  Surrendering was probably the most important of all the things Lee tried to do for his homeland.  

I know many people who try to cling to our four years in the Confederacy as if that were our culture.  It is not.  It did, however, leave devastating scars on the South.  Wounds that only began to heal when Lee surrendered at Appomattox.