From the Vault

December 12, 2008

By all accounts, I shouldn’t have taken the long road to Oxford that night. It was sleeting outside, a strange happening for Mississippi in November, but it fit my mood well. It was remarkable how dreadful my day had been going, and as I sat on the dirty, well-loved couch in my parent’s den, I couldn’t bring myself to move. I was a statue, silently staring at the bookcase across the room, thinking about nothing in particular, and sweating under my heavy overcoat and scarf. I hadn’t bothered to take them off when I came inside; I wasn’t planning on staying long anyway. I couldn’t get in touch with any of my friends in Oxford, I didn’t really have a place to stay that night, and no one in particular seemed to be excited in the least about me making an appearance in that old Southern city. One phone call from the fellow I was supposed to be visiting boosted my spirits a small bit, and so I gathered my things to leave. As I warmed my hands above the gas heater my mother and father approached me with good wishes for my trip, and palmed me some pocket money to get by on. I bashfully took it, knowing that I probably shouldn't.

I cranked up my ancient Toyota, and positioned the few road necessities in the passenger seat. My parents stood behind my car and waved mournfully as I pulled out of my icy driveway and into the Mississippi dusk. Ella Fitzgerald whispered through my car speakers as I turned up the heat and listened to the rattle of the old engine. “Blue skies, smiling at me, nothing but blue skies are all I see…” Ella Fitzgerald herself knew she lied those words as she sang them. But she sang for hope, she sang what she dreamed, what America dreamed. I drove with my back to a beautiful sunset, and the nose of my car pointed towards clouds heavy with snow and cold wind. It was a dark drive, full of revelations that were quickly lost in the thick forest that surrounded me. I considered life, I knew the answers, I beat my steering wheel from excitement that came from the sweet juice of the road, knowing what was in front of me, what was behind me. The pavement amplified the presence of other cars, and to me, their wet headlights only preceded empty metal shells. I was alone on the highway, those cars were just phantoms, weaving in and out of my elaborate daydreams. I pushed on through the night, driving through small towns, passing dark mansions surrounded by sticky oak trees and heavy tradition. What a place, what a place! It’s own world, so full of pride, so full of stories and great-great grand-daddies and family portraits.

I daydreamed that I was making a movie, that everyone was running slow motion to a great skyscraper in the city, that a faceless woman in a cotton flowered dress had a gun and a gas mask, and she jumped off the roof as they surrounded her. I played the dream in my head over and over and over, but it always cut short as she dove into the cool night air. I know she didn’t die. She had something to finish, a story to conclude.

Driving alone at night piques some sort of fascination with oneself. It’s not a haughty, narcissistic type of obsession. It is an innocent, child-like wonder in which you question everything about yourself. Suddenly I was a poet, I was like the wind on that southern road, passing silently through sleeping towns unseen, yet seeing all. Through my surroundings I absorbed their stories, and their way of life. I was a part of their community for mere minutes, and then I would return to the lifeless, endless road. I did not need to ask myself questions that everyone else asks. I knew who I was, I knew where I was going, I knew life’s answers. What I didn’t know were the little things, the people’s things. I wanted their stories, to be so engulfed in everyone else’s cultures that I would just fade into nothingness, just a part of everyone. Almost immediately after realizing this hope, I saw that I was thinking like a beatnik, that it seemed as if I was trying to force bad poetry down my own throat. But while the thoughts were flowing, man, they flew! And I loved them. I loved being vague and spiritualistic, I loved thinking the thoughts that I would later criticize others for having.

I pulled up to the streets of Oxford, Mississippi, stories heavy on my heart. There was no rest for me that night, as I nestled under a pile of blankets on an acquaintance’s dirty futon. I lay on my back, a little disgusted with myself. Maybe this was not who I was after all. After so many books, so many cups of tea, or as T.S. Eliot said, “After the skirts trailing along the floor”, I had been conditioned to consider myself a critic, a poet, the only lonely soul traveling the dark night. I was none of these things. Perhaps, I actually didn’t know who I was.

Morning came with breathy fog and warmth began to creep back into the Mississippi air. Everything I knew was changing. And that was ok.