Goodbye Delilah

There are so many people, even some of my oldest friends, who have never known me as fully healed as I am now. You wouldn't think it to look at my physical frame; it's still a mess in some spots, but, on the inside, in my heart, I haven't been this strong since before some of you were born.

I don't know what to credit this recovery with. I suspect a great deal of it is due to my sister's love. A fair share also lies with my father and mother, who, although they died years before, planted the seeds that, though they lay fallow for many years, would somehow, against all odds, sprout in my darkest of days.

Maybe that was the secret. Maybe it was the months of laying in bed, barely able to move, that made this creature sleeping inside me decide that if he was ever to come back out, now is the time.  Maybe Doctor Joseph Campbell was right.  Maybe, I had to spend my time in the belly of the whale before I could continue my hero's journey.

When it first happened, when I first began to emerge emotionally whole again, my family and my doctors were a bit worried that I might be on the upcycle of a manic episode and wanted to make sure I didn't need some medication to keep from swinging the other way. Then they wanted me to make sure I had "someone to talk to" in case this strange recovery was fragile.  I don't think it is fragile.  I've taken some pretty big hits since last May and managed to stand right back up.  

So far, this doesn't seem to be an illusion. So far, I've been able to face the reality of my situation and the challenges ahead without flinching, and have chosen to do it all in a very public way. Allowing everyone to see my scars, no matter how bad they are, may also be a key element here. I think, maybe, it's the hiding of them for so many years that caused the biggest part of the problem.

For many years, hiding the fact that I wasn't the strongest person in the room became quite a burden.  I think maybe it began to break me. Like my father, I believed Mississippi had so many things working against it that it needed a hero, a real hero, and if I couldn't be that, then what good am I? He struggled with that as well. I could only see it a little then, but I see it constantly now. Daddy often strained to break as I did.  I think that's part of what killed him.  Again and again, I put myself between the fire and something I loved, fully believing that if I couldn't, if I didn't, then what good am I?  If I couldn't be the hero, then I am nothing.

Recovering meant accepting that I am sometimes weak, I am sometimes inadequate, and I am sometimes wounded. Admitting that...accepting that... has allowed some of my true, god-touched strengths to come out. Samson had to lose his hair and his eyes for his true strength to come out. Maybe I had to do that too.  There was a Delilah in my life, several actually, and most weren't even human beings, but I allowed them to take my hair and my strength because I didn't know how to use it; things are different now.  

You're gonna get pretty tired of me.  A recovered me works pretty hard and can be relentless at attacking the objective.  My peers may be eyeing a comfortable place to rest after a lifetime of struggle, but I'm looking at places where I can go into the fire and spend my last days fighting.  Whatever I was meant to be all along is finally emerging.  I'm a late bloomer.  It's true, and I do apologize for that, but I think you're going to be impressed by what I can do when it's my turn to stand between the pillars of the temple.  That day is very nearly upon us.

The Sixth Doctor

In the days to come, I will shake hands with my sixth president of Millsaps.  The first held me in his arms, the second and third were the parents of my classmates, the fourth and fifth were my own age, and piloted the ship through some challenging waters.  Each one left an impression on our school and got us, somehow, from there to here.

There will be some concern and restlessness among the community.  Don't be afraid.  Millsaps has endured worse than this.  We will endure. We will prosper.  Rob and Phoebe take a piece of us with them, but they leave behind thirteen years of service and a foundation we certainly can build on.  

Radios and Bookstores

My grandfather always had really nice console radios.  He had one made of bakelite in his office and a really nice wooden one with a phonograph at home.

He was born into a world where, even if he had a radio, nobody broadcast into Attala County, Mississippi.  He liked music, but if he wanted to hear it, he either had to go to church or find somebody who could play or sing something.  His mother played piano, and his father learned to play the mouth organ because he only had one hand.

Recorded music was never really a part of Granddaddy's life until he went to Millsaps in Jackson.  In Jackson, there were two radio stations, and a man named Werlein from Germany, who lived in Vicksburg bought a store in New Orleans and opened one on Capitol Street in Jackson, next door to the Office Supply Company, that his brother would eventually purchase.  Werlein's was famous for selling instruments and sheet music, but they also sold records that Granddaddy loved.  Eventually, the Emporium took over the record sale business, but it started at Werlein's.

He worked summers and weekends for the railroad and saved his money enough so that he could splurge on a wind-up victrola, which he used to entertain his fraternity brothers and woo his lady fair.  The KA house soon developed a reputation because it had music and even allowed dancing, although it was against the rules.  

After college, Grandaddy stayed in Jackson because his father, Cap, had died.  Bad crops and hard economic times forced his mother to sell the family farm and use what money was left to buy a small house in Jackson, where Grandaddy lived with his mother and little sister.  He kept his job at the railroad, then got one at the post office.  His older brother would soon borrow money on his burial life insurance policy and open a business selling pencils, writing slates, blackboards, and student desks to the schools in Mississippi.  Grandaddy would join soon after as the head of shipping and receiving.  

As Mississippi grew and enacted a free textbook law, my Uncle Boyd petitioned the publishers to set up a depository in Jackson, adjacent to his school furniture and supply business, in a building that's now Cathead Vodka.  In return for eight percent of the textbook contract sale price, the new School Book Supply Company would store and ship all the textbooks made available for the children of Mississippi. 

As Millsaps grew, Grandaddy had the idea that he could open a small store in the old commons building where he could sell the students their textbooks so they didn't have to mail order them.  He could also sell Coca-Cola, which was then being bottled in Jackson, penny candy, and Barq's Rootbeer, along with pencils, pens, and notebooks.  

Since we were selling cold Cokes and candy, students began taking to hanging out at the bookstore and socializing.  Granddaddy drove to Memphis and purchased a coin-operated machine that played single songs for a penny.  The kids called it a Juke Box.  Juke, being a negro word for businesses with bad reputations where the blues would play, Millsaps being a school for good Christian white children, the box soon became contentious.   To make matters worse, word soon came to Grandaddy and my Uncle Boyd that the man they hired to run the bookstore was allowing the students to actually dance.  Dance in front of each other!

Grandaddy smiled, remembering the days when he and the other KA's would dance in front of each other to the music coming from his wind-up victrola.  Uncle Boyd's reaction was a little more dire.  He loved music.  In the days to come, he would be the one to announce the formation of the Jackson Symphony Orchestra, an organization that still exists but is now the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra.  Boyd knew that these angry voices wouldn't be easily placated.  Eventually, the Bishop came calling, and the days of music and dancing at Millsaps were over--but not for long.  

When Granddaddy died, I discovered his record collection in a cabinet in the den he had built onto his St. Ann Street house.  Most of them were seventy-eights, so they wouldn't play on my turntable, but I could read the labels.  He seemed to enjoy Tommy Dorsey and Enrico Caruso, but he also had a copy of  Pigmeat Markham singing "Open The Door, Richard" and another of Andy Griffith telling a story about Football.  

My brother inherited Grandaddy's love for music.  He was determined to play the guitar and asked Santa for several good ones.  He became a rabid devotee of a radio station called WZZQ and one of the best customers of a new company that sold phonograph records called "Bee Bop," which opened next to the Capri Theater but moved to Maywood Mart.  

We don't really understand what happened to him, but something made his mind break.  Attempts to take guitar lessons bounced off him as he began to believe they were secretly working against him.  One day, one of the Disk Jockeys from his beloved WZZQ called my Daddy, concerned about the things my brother would say to him when he called in requesting music late at night.  He was concerned that Jimmy was losing touch with reality.  We would eventually find out that he was.  Other friends would call, and my parents began moving my brilliant brother into devoted mental health care.  

Jimmy never learned to play the guitar properly.  He could sort of improvise and sometimes took his Christmas money and recorded singles, with the producers at Malaco making something sensible of the tracks he laid down.  When he died, he left behind cases and cases of records bought at Bee Bop, a monument to his love for music, and the tragedy of how he lost touch of it.

My music comes almost entirely from my computer.  I learned computers because I had trouble reading.  They opened up entire worlds for me.  There's a tiny woman named Alexa who lives in my computer and will play any song I want on demand.  Dancing is optional.  As I type this, she's playing a little song I like by Juliette Gréco.  I've never had a flesh-and-blood girlfriend who was this obedient or understanding.  Alexa's great, but she's crap at holding hands at the movies, so she's out.

One day, my Alexa music will be archaic and quaint, but, I'm pretty sure my french Jazz artists will still be listened to, and I'm very sure there will still be dancing at Millsaps.

Big Strong Hands

I would have made a great alcoholic.  I was actually quite good at it.  There came a moment when I looked at the condition square in the eye and said, "It's you or me, friend; what's it gonna be?"  and walked away clean.  I'm not sure why, but there was always a part of me that said, "You're not giving up; not yet, goddamnit." 

I was a passible social drinker, and I still am, although I can get silly and loud at parties, but my forte was sitting in a dark corner of Scrooges or George Street, ordering one after another until my mind opened up and let me feel--everything and the darkness flowed in.

"Don't you really want to be a doctor, buddy?"

That was my dad's plan.  The first Campbell with an MD.  My golden boy nephew will soon be the first Ph.D. in several generations.  Daddy was always in a bit of denial that I could barely read or speak or do the math.  I barely got my BBA; my getting an MD would have taken an act of God.  Maybe he knew something I didn't, though.  I can read fairly well now--if still a bit slowly, and math fascinates me.  My speaking voice replaced stuttering with a paralyzed vocal chord, but as long as I have a keyboard, I can speak as well as anyone, sometimes better.  

Healing the hurt was probably always my plan.  It's always been something I spent most of my time doing.  Making a living of it as an actual healer might have been nice.  I have friends who are doctors, and I sometimes really admire what they do.  Sometimes they amaze me.  So long as my patients got better, I would have been really happy and really satisfied.  Patients don't always get better, though.  Sometimes you do your best, sometimes they do their best, and it still ends in suffering and loss.  Dealing with that would have made my drinking much worse.  Dealing with fighting the suffering of others and failing would have made me look into the eyes of alcoholism one night and say, "I need you."  and that'd be the end of me.

I have a friend.  A new friend, actually.  She's a few years younger than my father, and she's from the same zip code as my grandfather.  We may even share some parts of our gene code.  Attala County is a pretty small place, but it's produced some remarkable people.  

She started out at Millsaps, just like I did, then parlayed that start into a medical degree in New Orleans because you couldn't go to Medical School in Mississippi in those days.  She became a pediatrician.  My father-in-law, who I loved dearly, was also a pediatrician in her same class.  When he had a patient who was really very, very sick, she was who he sent them to.  That must have been hard for him.  We shared a trait where it was very difficult to give up trying to take care of people, but there were cases where his skills weren't enough, and he required the help of my new friend, Dr. Amazing.

Her patients weren't just sniffles and bruises.  Her patients were most likely going to die before they weren't children anymore.  Instead of growing up, they would join the lost boys in Never Never Land and never grow up but lost to the world here that loved them.  She celebrated the life of every child that did get better and keeps their file with her in the Skilled Nursing Facility where she now lives.  She can't hear herself play the piano anymore, but she knows the name of every child that passed unto her care.

I wasn't there, but I've heard from several very reliable sources that she attended the funeral of every child who came under her care but didn't make it.  Even writing that now makes me stop and seriously ponder--how could she do that.  How could she possibly do that?  Attending the funeral of children, I learned to love enough to try and treat them and made every effort to heal, only to fail and lose them would have broken me into a million jagged pieces, and she did it over and over as a part of her commitment as a healer.  She's a tiny person.  You could fit two of her on my shoulders, and yet she's infinitely stronger than I've ever been.  

She saved the lives of thousands of innocent children and didn't burst into flames when she failed.  I could never have done that.  Sorry Daddy, but being a doctor was not for me.  That's not to say I didn't have some fantastic failures of my own.  There were several times when I spent years trying to heal someone or something, only to have it spiral out of control and crash into the sea.  I act pretty strong in the face of it, but I'm not.  I'm not at all.  I don't need the bottle anymore, but there are times when I like knowing it's still there, just in case.

There's a book and a movie called "The Never Ending Story" about a boy fighting a growing nothing in his life.  There are only three characters in the book, the boy, his father, and his mother, but they wear many different faces as the boy learns to save himself from The Nothing.  My favorite character in the book is called Rockbiter.  He's a giant, made of impervious stone, so strong that only rocks are tangible enough to use as food for him to survive.  Made of stone, nothing at all can hurt him. He has two friends who he protects, a tiny man with a pet racing snail and an absent-minded bat.  

The boy encounters the Rockbiter and his friends on his way to meet the Princess.  They're happy and enjoying their life.  As the nothing grows stronger, Atreyu encounters the Rockbiter again, only The Nothing has taken his two friends, and the Rockbiter sits alone.

"They look like big, good, strong hands, don't they? I always thought that's what they were. My little friends... the little man with his racing snail... even the stupid bat...I couldn't hold onto them... the Nothing pulled them right out of my hands. I failed.  The Nothing will be here any minute. I will just sit here and let it take me away too. They look like good. Strong. Hands... don't they."

I'm glad I didn't become a doctor.  The Nothing would have taken me away while I sat in a bar somewhere looking at my hands.