Going...Nowhere

Before I write anything, I'd like to mention that in that last post, I wasn't trying to sound homesick. My mom called the day after I wrote the post, worried that I was homesick. Which I'm not. All I was really trying to say was simply that I hate leaving places. In fact, nine times out of ten, the low, sinking feelings of going away from home sink away the moment that I get through the airport security and into a seat at my gate. Summer camps are a different matter, but that's for another day. I'm fine and happy and recently arrived in New York. I'll still be writing some DC posts soon, but I'll hope to catch up soon...

*****

It was by sheer coincidence that the Sunday after I arrived in DC, the National Cathedral hosted Mississippi Day at the Cathedral (something that happens every 4 years). Considering that the only conscious effort that I've made in my scheduling for this summer was to be in New York for the Mississippi Picnic in Central Park, I thought it was pretty remarkable that the one of the two Sundays I was going to be in DC was THE ONE for the next four years. Obviously, playing in with the feelings of homesickness, this was a nice way to sort of ease into being away from Mississippi.

But over the past week and a half, I've discovered that the problem is not so much, getting out of Mississippi. Geographically, it's quite easy. After all, Jackson is all of 50 minutes from Louisiana and maybe 90 from Alabama. The problem, I'm discovering, is leaving - completely. Let me explain.

It was a number of years back, when I last visited the National Cathedral. I can't exactly remember the reason for going - other than just being up in DC for vacation with my family. Either way, as we walked around the grounds of the Cathedral, my Dad stopped to pick up a penny dated 1974 - the year that my grandfather was installed as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church at that very cathedral. Anyway, ever since, I have always had this feeling that my grandfather's spirit lingers from time to time around that place. When I was in the Cathedral, a number of people came up to me just to tell stories about my grandfather and how much they had thought of him.

But it was actually after I left the Cathedral and took a 25 minute taxi drive out to Alexandria, Virginia for my first interview of this summer that I felt his spirit or at least his footsteps the loudest. The man whom I interviewed was - among many other things - a book collector. Besides having over 50 different editions and copies of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," the man also had a book entitled "Letters of James Agee to Father Flye." Without going into too much detail, it's a book that has collected the correspondence of James Agee (author of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Death in the Family") with his mentor - Father James Harold Flye, a priest and teacher at the St. Andrew's school in Sewanee, TN, a place just down the road from The University of the South (where my grandfather and a huge number of my family went to college).

Anyway, the man I was interviewing took the book off the shelf and opened to the front cover, reading it for a moment. And then, with a small smile, he closed the book (I include those details only because I love the way that people who love books hold them...something about the way that they cradle them) and looked up at me and said, "Well, I guess this is yours."

I opened the book and read the message written in thick black ink on the inside cover,

I visited Father Flye
in the Regency Nursing Home
in Monteagle, on June 17, 1984,
in his 99th year. He
handled this volume. but was
unable to sign his name.
His prints are on these pages.

John M. Allin
Sewanee
June 17, 1984
Trinity Sunday

It is not the prints of Father Flye that excite me. Instead, and of course, it is the the thought that my Grandfather handled this volume and that on Trinity Sunday in Sewanee, Tennessee, he would have sat down in front of a window, looking out over a place he loved so much, to write these words without any knowledge at the time, that they would find me (not even born for another two and a half years) on the road and away from home.

At times, I'm overwhelmed at the ways in which we are found - often in the most remote places - by the things which have such transporting powers that we can be home again. Like I said, getting out of Mississippi is not the problem. It's leaving that gets trickier.

One of the people that I spoke to in DC captured the sentiment well. He said, "You know it's funny. I don't think I was ever a Mississippian until I left Mississippi." Then later, as I spoke with another, he said, "For me, getting away from Mississippi has made me realize - and be grateful for - something. Mississippi allowed me to be from somewhere."

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I'm in New York City now, though I'll be writing a few more specific things about my time in DC. I took the train into Penn Station yesterday and though the skyline was shrouded by the low hanging clouds, it felt good to be here. Getting off the train, a boogey-woogey jazz beat echoed around the low stone ceilings of the underground train station. I came around the corner to see a woman - in a tight black dress with shoes kicked off the side near a column - dancing to the music (that I couldn't help but walk in beat to) while the band and the travelers who had a moment to spare, stopped to smile and enjoy her dance as she twisted and bounced to the music that, I like to think, was taking her back home somewhere many miles from here.