I usually don’t preface these posts with explanations, but I kept approaching something while writing this. It felt as much like a poem as 650 words can. It’s reaching for some sort of absolution for something I didn’t knowingly do. It barely mentions that which I feel the need to be absolved from. I had a hard time concluding so I did my best and am just letting it lay.
//
Pass Christian, Mississippi. 11/05/2023
The two by fours; or maybe two by sixes, meet a 6x6 in the corner of the porch at the coffee shop. A light breeze cutting the usual humidity when you're this close to the Gulf of Mexico, shimmering quietly 200 meters away. The new harbor confuses me momentarily. A post Katrina addition to the original, the yacht club barely visible behind the new infrastructure, a white building where an oxidized blue one used to be. I know it's there, just as I know a friend from high school's two year old child drown in the pool there. A loss immeasurable.
Scenic Drive, in The Pass, with its’ antebellum era mansions and affluence, a visual demarcation of the wealth disparity in Mississippi, perhaps even in America. I learned today that it is separated into an East and West, odd only in that the Western piece runs a mere half a mile from Market Street, the dividing point, the Eastern portion, 2.3 miles. How can this difference be justified?
I grew up a small part of this affluence. The Pass Christian Harbor and Yacht Club, where we kept our sailboat, across the street from the Western piece. Sailing...the southern equivalent of skiing and inadvertent telltale of wealth for those who had the means. "Do you sail?", the second whitest thing I can think of asking, second only to "Do you ski?"
To be fair, when 10 year old me sanded and oiled the teak each year (or was it constantly?) it never felt like affluence. Saying that aloud now, well, if it were possible for foolishness to wash over you, consider me drenched.
//
Ambivalence towards your state in life, however, is not a crime, and I, despite how it sounds, am tired of beating myself up for it. We can't change the past and as much as we'd like to think, I sometimes doubt our ability to change the future. We can all improve and use our state for more good than bad I imagine, but when presented with the behemoth that is our society set against the lack of control of what we were born into, it can feel impossible.
Still.
We must try.
//
Recently I sat and contemplated growing up on the Mississippi Coast, growing up anywhere really. I got caught up in how say a song off of Purple Rain made me feel when I was 14. How each song on that album seemed to match up with a different emotion. Longing (The Beautiful Ones), lust and sexual awakening (Darling Nikki), unrequited love (I Would Die 4U), and unabashed elation (Let's Go Crazy).
Of how the 2 square miles of Baton Rouge and LSU were an (my) entire universe. Of how important it was to me for these spaces and things to say something about me. To show the world who I was (am).
Then I wondered about how someone else living on the Coast or LSU during that time could have similar, unique and completely opposite or different emotional experiences attached to their music and space. Even the same music and space.
These types of moments are jarring to me. My view and life points of view so very unique, so encompassing. "This is how it affected me. This is important. How can you not understand!? These things changed my life. This is how it felt."
The overwhelming feeling of how this whole exercise of capturing through words is a dirtiness. Of being forced to face your own shallow perspective for its’ privilege and opportunity.
And still it's important.
And still I won't be ashamed.
These words are my truth.
These experiences, me and mine.
//
There's 800 ft. between Market St. in Pass Christian, MS and the end of W. Scenic Dr. an unnecessary demarcation. It's 112 miles from State St. in Baton Rouge, LA, which is 3 miles from where I sit right now. It's one of a million recurring scenes that delivered this person to you with all the goodness and flaws you see.
There's thousands of people who inhabited these spaces at the same times as I did. Their collective existence's concurrent and different.
These realities amaze and astound me. They make me feel small amongst the constant and irrefutable gravity upon me.
I will recognize and celebrate their importance.
#hugsandhi5s
While I sometimes want to leave BTR. Assknuckle KY hasn't entered the conversation. Yet.
Good stuff! I remember going out on that Catalina w/ you and your parents once and getting seasick after eating a roast beef sandwich on an onion roll that your mom very kindly made. To this day (tell your mom) I will not eat onion rolls.
The places you mention, really all places, are evocative for all of us, but in different ways of course. Point is, Martin’s Hardware for example, can bring up lots of different memories for all of us but they’re all grounded in the place. But the place is just a setting for the feeling/ experience. We all have to appreciate that people have the SAME (or similar) wants, wishes, dreams, goals, etc., they just manifest differently. I can ga-RON-tee (Thanks Justin Wilson) you that once upon a time a guy in Assknuckle KY looked out at Main Street on a Tuesday evening and thought, “I gotta get out of this town,” just like I did. And that same guy now probably thinks, just like I do sometimes, that it was actually pretty great, and wishes he hadn’t been so impatient with life. Thanks Pat.