Published: March 22, 2008 03:24 pm            

And he tells a big horse story

The little horse munches, listens, and breathes over its master’s hand....

Iona’s feelings are too much for him, and he tells the little horse the whole story.

— The Lament, Anton Pavlovich Chekov



My loyal readers, all seven of you — yes, I’ll knock myself down a peg or three after last week’s tirade — I write before you today to explain a few things about myself and the motivations that twirl inside me like wisteria vines over an old, leaning garage in mid-May. The vines that amble unseen one day beneath a blanket of pine straw behind a house on Chevy Chase Drive; the next day pop leaves and tiny violet flowers in bunches, like grapes, into sight revealing something unknown. Like a response in duress.

When I was named editor in December, I made a miscalculation. I figured many people knew who I was and had read some of my columns while I was sports editor and news editor. It turns out the assumption was probably incorrect, that’s why I’m taking today to introduce myself to you.

I’ll start at the beginning:

My mother and father met at Hub City Dragstrip ... wait, let’s move forward a few years. Plus, they could’ve met at Mrs. Cook’s, the popular, Grease-esque hangout in Columbia, Miss., I’m not sure which. Their first date may have been going to the drag strip. I digress.

I was born in the hospital in Columbia in 1970. Yes, I am older than I look, or so some really polite people have told me. Or, it could be told like the nice woman at Barren River Lake the summer we moved here who said I was much younger looking in person than how that picture in the newspaper made me look. She told my wife this, who relayed the message. There I go again on a right tangent. I guess tangents don’t really turn right or left, they just wander straightly. That must mean I wandered off on a right curve from the point where tangent met the curve.

Oh, there it goes again. OK. Back to the story.

(My loyal readers — Are you out there? — know that I blame these digressions on William Faulkner, but even his stream of consciousness stays within its banks. Virginia Wolfe’s? Now that’s a different novel.)

Ahh!

Back to me. This column is about me.

I spent my early childhood in Columbia, a town about half the size of Glasgow in population. I lived on a dead-end street called Pope. It was dirt when I was really young, then along came the city streets crew one day and they blacktopped it. I was an only child who spent his time hanging out with my dogs when at my house, my grandmother when at her house and exploring the nation when with my father — and sometimes my mother — who drove a semi for New Orleans Furniture factory.

That was in the early 1970s. Sometime in the mid-70s, my father went to work for Haliburton Oil as an offshore mechanic. He gets seasick easily and he doesn’t like to fly. There are only two ways to a rig in the Gulf of Mexico — by boat or helicopter. Going to work for him was a nightmare, I’m sure.

Later, my parents split, then divorced. He went back to driving a truck and she worked her way through college while I was a teenager.

One of my mother’s jobs while in college was working at the headquarters for the Army Recruiting Service in Hattiesburg, Miss. It was while she worked there that I learned of the G.I. Bill. It was the only way I was going to go to college, I knew, because I had spent too many years in high school not focused on school. My grades were not great, but I was not afraid of hard work, nor the Army.

I enlisted in December before graduating from Hattiesburg High in May. My thought process at the time was, “I want to do my two years, get my money and go to college.” I knew then that I wanted to be a writer. Like many 17 year olds, I knew everything. And nothing.

I marched into the military with my motivations exposed, knowing that in August of 1990, I would walk out with enough money to pay my way to a degree. I knew what I would be and what I wanted.

I did EPS in August of ’90 and I did enroll at the University of Southern Mississippi. I was done with that stage. The lessons were learned. But in January of ’91, I discovered the Army wasn’t done with teaching me when my mother opened a letter, then phoned informing me I had been recalled to serve in Operation: Desert Storm. The plans were sand in the wind.

It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered I knew nothing and still know nothing. I’m the little horse in Chekov’s story.

That’s my motivation now, is to hear a story and there are many in our community to be told.

James Brown is editor of the Daily Times. He can be reached by e-mail at jbrown@glasgowdailytimes.com.

        

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