Editorial
Front Page - Friday, October 29, 2010
Are we there yet?
Coming home
Jay Edwards
I woke up Monday at 5 a.m. Instead of hearing Gulf waves it was an Arkansas rain, which, as Paul Greeburg said so eloquently in his wonderful Sunday column, is a pretty nice sound too. We had been in Florida the week before, in the Panhandle at Blue Mountain Beach, for a vacation that lasted longer than originally planned. The sea will do that to you.
We left the beach house known as “Summer Winds” at 6 a.m. last Saturday. The sun was an hour away as we boarded the Honda for the six hundred miles back to reality; a trip that always seems longer when you’re driving back to it.
I always break the familiar journey into segments. Going home it’s Mobile, Hattiesburg, Jackson, Vicksburg, Tallulah, Lake Providence, Lake Village, McGehee, Dumas, Pine Bluff and then LR. Scattered between are names like Navarre, Gulf Breeze, Moffett, Loxley, Sana-torium, Transylvania, Eudora and Grady.
On this trip I Googled Sanatorium and found it to be the name of a community in Simpson County, Mississippi, just northwest of Magee. It was named for the Mississippi State Tuberculosis Sanatorium, which was a hospital for TB patients from 1918 to the 1950s. In 1976, the old Sanatorium facilities were transferred to the MS Department of Mental Health and renamed Boswell Regional Center, which is now an Intermediate Care Facility for Persons with Mental Retardation and other developmental disabilities. Just so you’ll know.
Sanatorium was also once home to the only drive-in movie theatre in the region. I’ve never seen it but they also say the ruins of the decaying screen can still be seen from old highway 49.
In the 1990s, the Sanator-ium postal address was abolished, the local post office torn down, and the community was incorporated into the city of Magee. But there are still highway department signs announcing it. I’m glad; a sanatorium should be a part of every journey.
It’s also along this stretch where some local potato farmers park their spud-filled pickups by the side of the road and try and make a sale or two. If you’re planning on going into the tater selling business, you might want to look elsewhere that Simpson and Covington counties in Mississippi.
There were tater-sellers every two or three miles, and not one customer between them. I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and found Idaho, but even I don’t drive that fast. There must have been thirty or more of those tater sellers between Hattiesburg and Jackson. Drive a few miles, see a tater seller, drive a few more, another tater seller.
Finally, after spotting fif-teen or so of them, I spotted another truck up the road a ways. But the closer I got I could tell it wasn’t overflowing with taters like all the other trucks we’d passed. When I got right next to him I could see the product was something that looked like flags, some American and some Confederate, and they were wrapped in plastic and stacked high on a table. He wasn’t fooling me, I knew they were really taters in a clever disguise.
I rolled down the window as we passed and yelled – “That ain’t flags, that’s just more taters!!” (I thought saying ain’t in that part of the world would lend credibility).
“Too bad they closed the sanatorium,” Kathy muttered.
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We made it into Arkansas and I was able to pick up the fuzzy, static sounds of Chuck Barrett, the voice of the Razorbacks. I knew from text messages from my brother-in-law Bob that we had built a 24-10 lead. It was around that time that they suspended play, the first time, because of lightening.
Rick Schaeffer began filling the unscheduled airtime with tales of past bad weather games. I remembered being in Little Rock in 1971 when we beat Texas 31-7 in a downpour. (Speaking of Texas - Iowa State?)
Then Schaeffer mentioned
a game against Tulsa in Fayette-ville, when it rained hard nearly the whole time. He didn’t mention the year or the score, but he didn’t need to because I was there. It was 1974 and we won 60-0. My dad had taken me, and one of my friends; we sat there until the final whistle blew, looking like drowned rats, soaked through and through. It had been a great day and a memory of my late father I’ll cherish forever.
Kathy and I made it back
to Little Rock at 4:15 p.m. We stopped at U. S. Pizza on Rodney Parham and there was less than a minute to go in the marathon game. I watched Petrino and Nutt greet each other at midfield for a quick handshake. It made coming home from the beach a little sweeter.
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