I was celebrating an appointment that concluded “return only as needed”, by stopping off at Grammy’s, a place for great baked goods and coffee refills. I was seated at one of the smallest tables, the ones typically used by solo customers.

An older man was sitting at an identical table in front of me, but at a right angle, so that I faced his left side and could only make out the first two letters prominently displayed on his baseball cap. He may have looked over in my direction early on, but I was already well into the pastry, coffee and looking at facebook on my phone.

I wondered for a moment if electronic media had interfered with the opportunity for live personal contact. He sat five feet away. I had just entered a comment in response to an acquaintance in Rochester, 1300 miles to the northeast. I looked again. He looked like he might welcome sudden contact breaking in on his left side, a question perhaps about his hat. But then again maybe not.

He reminded me of a “country person”, someone whom I see here a lot, someone you would see at a coffee shop in Clifton Springs, or Palmyra, or at any smaller town that is thirty or more miles separated from a larger population, separated by open fields, farms. Attached ring suburbs are ruled out.

He would be instantly engaging, other than a momentary pause to account for putting his private thoughts away, to account for my geographical displacement, knowing intuitively that I am not from here.

Country folks are in the place where they are from. A lot of family, living or not, nearby. They have stories about the intersection, not that far away, notorious for what happened there. It wasn’t all that long ago. There are also the local stories about the, in fact, long ago.

Such familiarity brings a contentment. Maybe. If the roots are more good than not. A slower, less demanding pace. Another easy sip of coffee, looking out the window, a friendly indifference.

When, on the other hand, the well known acquaintance shows up, the spark is immediate, instantly showing the mutual history of ups and downs, all of which is honored for the experience. Known each other for a long time for better or worse. There is nothing to replace that.

Sometimes it’s different than this, sometimes the local guy beams like a bright light, sends a quick humorous message that is simply shared, reciprocated with no effort.

But not this fellow.  When he left, he took a long time to leave, he stopped and turned around to look up again at the list of specials, as if he had regrets, or might plan better for the future.  He didn’t speak to anyone as he left.

There was already one response to the facebook message.  I decided to tap “like”.  Right back at you.

The trip was specifically to see the current exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, an amazing series of paintings in the photo-realism genre. I looked forward to having Bill see what Wendy and I had seen a few weeks earlier, to see it, enjoy it.

It is a great show, and we took our time to marvel at the detail, the phenomenal use of light, reflection, shadow.

After we left the museum, we were walking along the sidewalk which is bordered by a tall iron fence along one side of the park. As we moved along slowly, we saw what appeared to be the slumped over body, sleeping-probably, of what was likely a homeless man, dressed in long-unwashed clothes, a large satchel by his feet. It was not a warm day, and we were bundled, as much as one does in New Orleans, on a chilly day in January.

We stopped and looked. The body looked as if it might be lifeless, the way the legs were sprawled, slightly bent. Bill called 911, was transferred to an emergency medical unit. After the call, we slowly moved on as a woman walking with her dog approached. We had gone a little distance before I turned around and watched her make a wide circle out to the curb and beyond.

It was several minutes later, after we had reached the car and started to head for the park’s exit, that we heard the siren. Bill said something like, “Those are our guys.” I thought he meant that his work somehow had a connection to a fire and and ambulance crew. I had already, in the space of five minutes, forgotten about the slumped over body.

It was a few days later when I recalled the incident, and realized that had I been alone, I would most likely not have called 911. It would have been, for me, yet another instance when I did not want to see what I was seeing, did not want to commit to any action if I had the option not to act. If it was a crisis, I would do my best to imagine that it wasn’t one. Denial. Not wanting to be bothered, not wanting to be challenged. Just another homeless guy sleeping.  Wasn’t he?

The fellow ahead of me at Walgreen’s was a big guy and he spoke with a heavy Southern drawl. He had a bit of trouble at the checkout and he told the clerk that he was “down here because my sister passed away.” The clerk was a young fellow, seemed a bit befuddled, not completely present.

The big guy must have hesitated outside the door because he was there when I stepped out. As he checked his small paper bag for whatever he’d just bought, he looked over at me and said “Well your weather down here is a lot warmer.” We just had the coldest day of the season, a low of 21 the night before. He said, “It was nine degrees yesterday.”

I asked him where he was from, expecting he would name some northern Mississippi town.

He said, “I’m a country boy, from the mountains of Virginia. My town is so small that if three cars park together at night, you know that there was a meeting and the taxes are going to go up.” Heavy drawl.

Bay St Louis has a population of about 8,200 people, the adjoining town of Waveland is slightly smaller. Folks along the coast tend to have a very soft, not heavy, southern accent. And people from New Orleans, which has a prominent influence here, have an almost Bronx/Brooklyn accent, with a touch of Canadian (the word ‘out’, pronounced something like “owoout” the way Canadians do).

I was speaking in my northern voice, maybe a tad less western new york nasal than a year ago. I said, “Well if you’re here a few more days, it will warm up.”

He said he’d be here for three weeks. His sister was 93, and he had just seen her at Christmas. Another sister had also died recently. I expressed my condolences. He said, “Things are too busy here, too much traffic.”

I said, in essence, “You’re kidding.” He enjoyed the brief conversation, as did I, and we walked slowly to his car which had a Virginia plate with a disability designation. He evidently thought I was a local. Which I am. Sort of.

I tried to say something nominally encouraging. As I slowly moved away toward my car I said, “Well, you’re taking care of business.” Doing what you need to do. Doing the right thing.

He would have been happy to talk longer. His immediate response to me was, “I gotta say this, I like your food here.”

Enough said.  His summation.  We exchanged friendly waves, and life resumed.

I’d been dragging my feet about this, putting on the brakes. The necessity to change my driver’s license from the great Empire state of New York to the Magnolia state of Mississippi.  Now it was January of the new year.  1/6/15, the traditional day of Epiphany.

The local office of the DPS, Department of Public Safety, is in a small town ten miles north as the Pelican flies. Kiln Mississippi, often referred to as “the Kill”, often with an implied smirk and country wink. Though I had the GPS set, when “she” said “turn left”, I answered to no one in the car, “What? where?” because I didn’t see anything other than some scattered buildings, gravel parking lots, trees. I went a mile farther on and stopped to ask directions at a convenience store. The clerk said it was “a biddy building” just before the stop light I had passed.

Sure enough. A biddy building. You check in at the door on an electronic touch screen that reminds you about the documents you need if you are over 17 and applying to change your state license. Original raised seal birth certificate, original Social Security Card, two proofs of local residence like utility bills with your current address. I had checked the web site in advance and was prepared. And nervous. Take a number and join the other 19 people sitting in government chairs facing one direction. Paper signs saying things like No Cell Phone Use.

The website had said that if you are changing your license from another state, “you may not have to take the written test.” I had a vision of giving up my license, flunking the test, and asking to get my NYS license back until I could study the booklet. Worse case scenario. Wendy says I worry too much. It’s true, and I worry about worrying too much.

When my number was called, the friendly clerk said, “Okay, let’s see what documents you have,” in a cheerful voice and she was impressed that I had everything prepared, including the application form I had printed online and completed.

As she went over my paper work and began to fill in some other information, she noted the NYS license I had just handed her.  She told me that she had moved here from New Rochelle, “actually the Bronx”, thirteen years ago just before her son was set to start middle school. (In an unscientific survey where the N is 2, this was another African American mom who talked about how pleased they were to leave NYC years ago to come south just as their children were reaching middle school).

New York! As she continued to work her magic to make me a legal driver, we shared North to South stories. She missed the variety of food here on the Gulf Coast vs NYC. Her father used to be a chef at a prestigious NYC restaurant. I told her about the great Chinese restaurant we had just discovered in Pass Christian and she was delighted to hear this. She almost forgot to ask me to take the vision test. Read the top line, the big print. I did great until the last set of four letters that were a bit blurry. Apparently my answers sufficed. “Good enough,” she said. Bless her heart.

It just took a minute to print the shiny new license with its not-bad photo. We said goodbye to each other. When I stepped outside to the gravel parking lot, I had an unexpected sense of having arrived. The sun was shining.  I pulled out onto the two lane highway that leads back to the coast,  put in the CD “L.A. Treasures Project,” with its whooping Count Basie-like swinging drive.

There are these moments.

I was on the phone with a subscription service that I wanted to cancel before the end of my free period of usage. The good fellow on the other end of the conversation was clearly supposed to encourage me not to cancel, in fact to offer me enticing upgrades and extensions.

I imagined him being in the Philippines or perhaps India, though he could have been Kansas City. I don’t normally raise my voice with hard working sales people. As the fourth iteration of saying “No, I just want to cancel the subscription,” approached, I upped the ante to say, “Look, this is the fourth time I am telling you, I only want to cancel. Please just cancel the service. That is all.”

I imagined him imagining his surpervisor, the one in the glass tower looking over the room full of workers wearing headsets, finally relenting and giving him silent permission to grant my leave.

After the call terminated, I put my phone down on the desk, and muttered something like “oh my god, what a pain!”. A moment passed. And then another moment. Suddenly I heard a distant voice calling me.

“Mr. Sullivan?” the small voice called. “Mr. Sullivan, you didn’t hang up the phone.”

Okay, so I got depressed, so to speak. Not quite over the cusp of a truly clinical episode. But troublesome enough. The short lived termite swarm in May and June (which turned out to be harmless, but who knew at the time?) was punch number one. Punch number two was my first extended experience of June and July’s unrelenting heat and humidity. I needed and took a terrific vacation break by going back to Rochester, the old house on Woodbine, the two younger kids living there, the community of friends at St Stephens. Six weeks. I never appreciated how lovely the weather is in western new york in August and early September.

The time was well spent, including a couple of wonderful family and friend re-unions, a chance to play piano in the Craig Mullen ensemble and to play a gig with brother Tim in a neighborhood porch music event.

Little did I know that my enthusiasm to trim back the overgrown Rose of Sharon bushes in the yard of the Rochester house would lead to a hidden undoing once I had returned south. Add into that a wonderful but perhaps costly bike ride September 7th along the Erie Canal that ended when I felt a “pop” in my right knee. “Not good” I said to myself (spoiler alert, there will be no senior complaints about bowel problems) though there was no pain for many days subsequently which made me nearly forget the whole episode.

I had a fun three day drive back south, saw the Big Muskie in eastern Ohio, and was happy to use the car to load up lots of books among other things in the continuing settling-in at the Southern estate.

Three days after my return, just as I started to mow the overgrown lawn, I was mowed under by a great deal of unrelenting pain in my right leg. Two ER visits in the next four days (the local hospital in town and the “big hospital” in Gulfport) indicated a diagnosis of radiculopathy, which I heard as ridiculopathy, being completely foreign, lucky me, to the fact of needing to be dependent on others, having to use a cane, slowly, obviously.

It is now about two months after those early fateful days of being a sudden consumer of health services. Thanks to a terrific team of providers, especially in Physical Therapy, I have been cane free the past week at last, with a number of other slowly improving changes showing up.

Didn’t see this coming. I just re-read the first comments in this blog about hitting the ground running, ground running in its own direction. But enough about me. My world view may be more understanding of all those folks I see hobbling along, walking with enduringly odd gaits, swings of the leg and lower torso. I’m more aware of the small moments of movement. Stop, stand up straight, stay balanced, do the exercises, new goal for the day: keep up the work on loosening the ham strings.

So here is a related aside. In a conversation with a physician in Rochester who used to work in the south, I asked what he had observed about working with patients in the south vs the north, and after a short pause he said, in effect, “patients in the south don’t whine as much, don’t feel so entitled.” I have to be careful about making sweeping generalizations, but I must say I am enamored of my fellow PT patients and their sense of optimism, endurance, cheerfulness for god’s sake, and, being here, for God’s sake.

A low pressure system has been stuck out in the Gulf, and folks have been waiting for some days for the reported high pressure system now in Texas to nudge its way to the east, to head across Louisiana, its swamps and oil fields, miles of refineries, to finally sail over the top of southern Mississippi.

As the weather in the Gulf dances its own zydeco two step, staying largely in place with the waves below and clouds above, the rain comes down here on the coast in sheets and buckets and then stops. And then starts again. All the while, it is very warm. This is not, not at this time of the year, like the coast of Ireland. That will come later in February.

So on a humid early morning, walking toward the front steps of St Rose, carrying the only umbrella I could find (bright blue, child size), I see the line-up of umbrellas standing just outside the front door. They are leaning upright and awaiting turns like kids at the end of a school day, maybe only then noticed for who they are, redeemed, made useful once again.

There is a locally famous politician at the service, sitting in the back. It is voting day for the local Primaries. I hadn’t seen him here before in my short tenure. When Mass ends, we all stand outside under the front portico for a few brief moments. The locally famous politician shakes hands, mine too, and I notice his hand feels thick, calloused, as if he had worked for years as a tradesman, though I imagine the roughness comes from the countless hands gripped and released over his years of service.

I watched as he walked away down the sidewalk, the small crowd dispersing, heading for their cars. He was by himself. He had muttered that it was going to be a long day.

It was a very humid Mississippi morning. Someone made a joke about preparing their ark.

I learned later that he had lost the election. He had been, for many, their best hope in this place.

We didn’t get the memo about turning out the lights. So when we encountered our first termite swarm, predictable, so they say, in the month of May, I regretted having the automatic motion detector in the side yard.

It could have been a classic western new york snow squall, the kind that you see under the lights, hoping that school and work will be cancelled the following day. When they flew en masse, the light did what it was made to do, shine brightly, which attracted ever more of the small winged insects.

The termites, as well, were doing what they were programmed to do—emerge from the ground, fly for the few moments of life yet remaining in the hopes of mating on such a warm and humid night, with the the frogs beginning their second chorus, adding now a bass section.

It did not help to yell hysterically at the light. Windows, doors and screens do not fully keep them out of the home. They are too small, too much in heat. Too many of them get in.

It was the talk of the small community at St Rose the following morning. A number of them lay dead in the sacristy. An elderly man, accustomed to the annual invasion, said he just got under the covers till morning. “You turn out your lights,” he said.

“Not to worry,” they all say, it doesn’t mean, necessarily, that your home has become infected. It would be nice to delete ‘necessarily’. “You just vacuum them up the next day.” And the one following that. And every now and then, when I look down at the floor, or windowsill…

On the morning of the Martin Luther King Day parade in Bay St Louis, my neighbor’s adult son was passing by on the street and I called out “Good Morning!” He seemed surprised to hear a voice and he had to look around to see who had greeted him. He waved and went on a few more steps before he turned and called out, “there’s going to be a parade today!” This, in parade happy already-gearing-up-for-Carnival Gulf Coast Mississippi.

At St Rose church, at the end of the Sunday service, a young man, well dressed, got up to share a few reflections about MLK, about his parents’ and his grandparents’ generation. He said, in effect, “It’s really hard to realize what they went through. We almost have no idea. Things are so different today.”

MLK parade day was also the first day I took a spin on Bill’s loaned bike. Like a kid again, playing, easy flat streets to navigate. As I was heading for the coast road and the trail along the beach, I went by a house and an old fellow was walking down his driveway, doing some kind of lawn chores. He spotted me and raised his arm in friendly salute.

Riding along the bike path that follows the coast road, I could see far down on the beach, a couple of kids running along the edge of the sea. Their bare feet kicked up sand and water spray. One chased the other. They hooted and hollered, lost, or found, in the moment.

In the coffee shop, a very elderly man came in by himself, was greeted as a regular, and proceeded to have his usual oatmeal. He was leaving at the same time I was. I was surprised and delighted to see that he had arrived on a very well used bicycle, a comfort bike, as they say, and he had a large wooden stick tied to the back fender. I said to him, enthusiastically, “That’s the way to get around!” He immediately apologized, said “Oh no, of course, here, get around,” as he moved over to let me pass my. It took me a moment to realize what he thought I had said.

Sunday 1/19/14

 It is so easy to have doubts about one’s writing, whether it is good enough.  It is so easy to feel fraudulent.  And then the inertia sinks in, oh so easily, leading to less energy to keep at it, less effort to market what has already been written. 

All it took the other day to jump start the needed hope was to see a picture.  I was looking at a review in the NPR arts section of their website.  It was the book cover for  “All Standing: the remarkable story of the Jeanie Johnston The Legendary Irish Famine Ship”.  A tall wooden ship with its masts and rigging, sailing as if in the evening, a storm  threatening. 

I immediately felt a renewed passion for the whole Irish migration story, and for the novel “Paddy O’Neil’s Trunk”.  The work needed to be kissed a few more times and then sent on its way, again, to see if some publisher would take a liking to it.

“Yes”, said the spirits, “don’t stop now, someone may enjoy it, someone may find it to be of value.” 

Staying hidden in the thumb drive will not do.