Justice? Redemption

Every morning, Alexa plays a little tune until I sit up and say, "Alexa, Stop."  Then she says, "Good Morning.  It's six o'clock.  The Temperature is seventy-eight degrees.  Today expect cloudy skies and a high of eighty-four degrees.  "  

Then she plays "Philadelphia Morning" from the Rocky Soundtrack.  That image of Rocky struggling to breathe while he jogs and holding his sides in pain when he reaches the top of the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is what gets me out of bed in the morning.  Rocky suffered and suffered, but he got better.  That thought inspires me.

A guy like me can stay in bed all day, every day.  I have the kind of mind where I can keep myself intellectually stimulated without ever speaking to another person or seeing the world outside of my room.  The problem is, the world actually is outside of my room.  I can stay in my room forever, but I'll never fulfill the contract of my creation.  My job is to do something to the world, something with the world, not sit in the dark imagining it.  There's an imaginary dog that yips at me whenever I think about forgetting that.

I sent the first chapter of my book to a few people for mostly good reviews.  A few people said, "Uh-oh, I can't believe you're talking about that."  The inciting action in my book is a fictionalized version of something that actually happened.  It's fictionalized mainly because I want a very different ending than what really happened.  I'm also not about the business of exposing people's personal suffering to the world.  There will be quite a bit of suffering in the story, but it's imaginary people, not real people.  I don't think I could do it otherwise.

My first several chapters will be chasing my characters up a tree and then throwing rocks at them, a quote attributed to both Nabakov and Hitchcock.  Hitch probably stole it.  Young people cross several really significant Rubicons as they grow.  The first is learning to walk, then going to school, then puberty, and going to high school and college.  Eventually, they emerge as an adult and start a completely different journey.

Young people arrive at college, often with the wounds inflicted on them before still bleeding, but without the support structure they always had, and sometimes they go a bit mad without it.  

Hurt people hurt others.  Every psychologist will tell you that.  Injured people hurting others and getting hurt themselves is the action that drives my narrative.  Characters not recognizing that they don't have to stay on the road where they find themselves is what sustains it.

In the real world, when bad things happen, people cry out for justice, but they never get it.  I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I don't think I've ever seen a case where justice was served.  

Orestes killed his mother and his uncle to seek justice for his murdered father, who was murdered for taking the life of his daughter Iphigenia; then, he spends three more plays struggling with the gods to try and discover justice.   Arguably, he never does it, but through his efforts, he redeems himself.

That's what I want my characters to do.  I want them to go through hell and then redeem themselves.  The question of justice will hang in the air unresolved.  That's intentional.  

Thirty years ago, Bobby DeLaughter and Ed Peters shocked the world by bringing Bryan De La Beckwith to trial.  Whatever would happen to Bobby in the future, that was a monumental moment in Mississippi history.  De La Beckwith was convicted and died in prison, but was justice served?  We could have burned De La Beckwith at the stake along with all his companions, but would that be justice for the death of Medgar Evers?  Could their suffering replace his loss?  My argument is "no."   Justice is a thing we seek but cannot find.

Redemption is possible, though.  If we put our minds to it, we can each achieve some level of redemption every moment of every day.  A daily struggle for redemption is how we pay back the lord for the air we breathe and the water we drink, and redemption begins with forgiveness.  Not the forgiveness from God, although that's vital, but forgiving ourselves and allowing us to redeem ourselves.

These are the ideas I'm going for.  We'll see how well I do.

In the meantime, I'm having one last breakfast in the little cafe out here.  The food's pretty good.  They'll bring the food to you, but if I let people serve me all the time, I'd never get out of here, and getting out of here is happening really soon.  

 

The Economic Shortfall in Mississippi

Even though I live in the poorest part of America, I received one of the best possible educations on economics, taught by brilliant, very Christian-thinking people.   Mississippi has some truly brilliant people working on our considerable economic problems.  They're people with varied perspectives and qualifications, but they're all very genuine and all ultimately working for the same goal.  I'm proud to say most are from here.

We're still failing, though.  On every economic metric, we're failing.  The problem we're facing is the human condition is so complex and so nuanced that no economic system or combination of economic systems is capable of meeting all our needs.  Despite our bountiful economic resources, our history and our internal conflicts create such a complicated economic landscape that we're simply not able to provide for our people.

In Mississippi, there is a considerable shortfall between our reach and our grasp.  You won't hear me say this very often, and I don't mean everybody, but there are some very conscientious and Christian people in our Legislature working as hard as they can to elevate us out of the spot we're in and have been for as long as I can remember, but there's only so much they can do.

This considerable gap between what we need and what we have is what keeps me up at night.  The only way we can make sure all the people of Mississippi are clothed and fed and close this gap between what our economy supplies and what our people can provide is with the ancient concept of simple Christian charity.  

When you use words like "charity," for many people, it conjures up images of little old ladies at bakesales or rich people who don't care at black tie events, but it's so much more complicated than that.  Charity is what keeps Mississippi alive.  Nearly everyone on my Facebook list is involved in some form of charity.  Some are involved in EVERY form of charity.  We have such an enormous capacity for human capacity that there are a good dozen or more who are intimately involved in charity for dogs and cats.

My father taught me some very simple lessons.  People will hate me if I'm not humble.  I come from poor farmer stock in Mississippi and poor farmer stock in Scotland and Ireland before that.  I must never try to elevate myself beyond a deep concern for the poorest people in Mississippi.  That's where charity comes in.  As a people, Mississippi may never really be prosperous, but we can be kind.  We can be sufficient so that not even the least of us suffers.  That's where charity comes in.

Yelp Reviews

 For about a hundred years, I've written restaurant reviews in my journal.  I just never showed anybody.  My goal is to eventually post a really good review for all my favorite restaurants.  If I haven't gotten to your restaurant yet, I will!

My Yelp Page

Lunch Downtown

Getting ready for the big move, I went downtown to meet the movers.  Since I was nearby, I went to the Mayflower for lunch.  Since 1975, I've done this maybe seven hundred times.

I've known Jerry for something like forty years.  In that time, there have been maybe eleven encounters when he didn't find something to complain about.  His cousin was like that.  His dad was too.  Greeks are pretty straight shooters.

Jerry's complaint yesterday was that it was a beautiful summer day, a quarter till noon, the IBC was getting ramped up, and his restaurant was nearly empty.  Judge Waller came in.  His dad ate there every day since before he served as governor, so I guess he's just keeping up the tradition.  A couple of three tops came in, and an out-of-town couple who didn't know to order anything with the salad dressing but somehow weren't connected with the ballet.

It wasn't Jerry's fault.  My gumbo and seafood salad was as good as it was the three hundred other times I've had it.  It wasn't the fault of the IBC.  I met with a cluster of dancers having lunch at Millsaps, and they were having a great experience.  Truth be told, parts of Jackson are dying.  Jerry's restaurant is in one of them.

When Jerry was thinking about buying the restaurant from his dad and his cousins, we talked about it a good bit.  He had a great strategy and good financing.  It was a good deal.  Downtown then didn't have any retail traffic to speak of, but it had a lot of people, and his tables were always full.  Some fifteen years into it, Parlor Market moved in and brought Mayflower as much business as they had their own.  It was a good time.  That's when I moved downtown.

Jackson's biggest problem is jobs.  There aren't enough.  All the crime and dropping property values, and rotting infrastructure go back to jobs.  If we had the same employment levels we had in 1980, the Mayflower would be packed.

In 1980, between Missco, McCarty-Holeman, McRaes, and Deposit Guarantee, you were looking at something like twenty-five hundred jobs.  Maybe more.  In 2023, those four companies hired zero people.  That's a number that's kept me awake at night for twenty years.  

Part of the problem is that we've had a massive accumulation of wealth in very few people since Jimmy Carter left office.  The last major anti-trust action was Judge Brown vs AT&T.  That ended in 1984.  Just speaking for our own company, there was really no way we could compete with companies coming into our market with fifteen and twenty times as much capital as we had.  Like McRaes and McCarty-Holeman, we formed a purchasing group with other companies our size.  I was deeply involved in creating it.  With that, we were able to have price parity with Office Depot and Staples for a while, but they had so much money for other areas of how that business reaches the market that we were really probably doomed to failure, no matter what.

The last time this happened, the situation was actually much worse, but we're getting there.  What saved us was Teddy Rosevelt, a Republican, who became the greatest trust-buster in history.  The moves he made and the legislation he passed made it possible for companies like the ones I mentioned to make a profit in Mississippi, which has been the poorest state in the union since the war, the Civil one, not the one in Europe.

A lot of people are going to disagree with the economics of my assessment, but I feel like the evidence is there.

A lot of times, when I mention doing things downtown, I get a handful of responses like, "Aren't you afraid of getting shot?"  Well, I've always been afraid of getting shot.  Hell, listening to TW Lewis and Ed King talk about what happened to them in the sixties, and I don't know that I've ever been safe.  

Jackson has a crime problem that's undeniable, but over-inflating it isn't helping anything.  The Mayflower is a hundred feet from the federal building, two hundred yards from the Governor's Mansion, and two hundred and fifty yards from not only Jackson Police Headquarters but now the Capitol Police Headquarters.  I've lived downtown for fifteen years, and I've never had a problem.

Parts of Jackson are very sick.  Parts of my body are very sick.  Neither of us is dead yet.  The Jackson Police, The Hinds County Sheriff's Department, the Capitol Police, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol have combined efforts to make sure that your experience at the International Ballet Competition is safe and enjoyable.  While you're downtown, eat at the Mayflower and Ironhorse and King Edward and Hal & Mals.  Don't give in to hate and fear.  Even though I'm moving, you'll probably see me around.

Two Tiny Opals

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What happened, Buddy?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land of Confusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Product Review: Jean Jacket

PRIJOUHE Men's Denim Vest 

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

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

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

Available on Amazon

 

First One Awake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Little French Press

 

I really like my French Press.  It makes just one cup of coffee.  It comes in black or pink, and they also have a two-cup model.

A French press is a little more work than a Keurig or drip coffee maker, but it makes a superior cup of coffee.  I use two tablespoons of coffee to make a 12-ounce cup of coffee.  The ritual is part of my mornings.  

  Available on Amazon