That’s me, Russell Lott, age 16 and seated center,
with a few of my cousins at Papa Bond's place in the
Beatrice Community of southeast Stone County, Mississippi (July 1970).
Welcome
For many years now, I’ve wished to put a few things in writing, sharing some of my thoughts and experiences, and some of the pursuits and interests I enjoy most, doing it in a way that would engage others with similar tastes. Of course, a blog will do all that–it’s not a new concept–but my earlier hesitations to starting such a project have been manifold: I won’t have time for it, maybe when I retire; there are thousands of blogs out there–probably millions; do I have anything to say, and who would want to read it Well, I am now retired (twice retired, in fact) and I have the time. Yes, there are beaucoup blogs in the blogosphere, some are really great, well-written and creative, many are quite dreadful, a few are wonderfully mediocre but provide a needed release for their creators and maintain a small but loyal following. My blog probably won’t generate a nickel’s worth of attention, but if it falls into that latter category, I’ll be okay with that—I can handle mediocrity. The truth is, I’m doing this for myself. Plus, this coronavirus-quarantine-thing of late has cast a whole new layer of impetus on my nagging notion that I should do this now.
But where to start such a project? With only a few poorly thought-out ideas for content and a format, I read through a small text file I keep on my PC’s desktop simply called “I Love…” It’s a file I created a few years ago, and have sporadically updated since, where I write on each line a short statement about an item that interests me. There are well over a hundred little snippets in this file that to some degree help to encapsulate who I am and what I’ve been thinking. Many entries relate to music, many to wordplay, others to my favorite books, movies, podcasts, and pastimes. More than a few entries hit more than one of these buttons simultaneously (for example, “I love the wordcraft in the lyric phrase ‘hurry-home drops on her cheek’ in Chuck Berry’s song Memphis”). Some are silly and some are too personal to share here. With this file as a jumping off point, along with a few old family photos and some of the reminiscences of my youth, I hope to find enough fodder to sustain, at least for a while, an outlet that satisfies my urge to create something. And if someone else might find it interesting, well, all the better.
Russell Lott
March, 2020
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Recently, my brother, John, reposted on his Facebook page an item from a group devoted to old Mississippi photos. It consisted of a Hattiesburg postcard from 1907 that pictured a Lindsey logging wagon pulled by four teams of oxen and loaded with a single log of virgin pine. I was awed by the size of that lone piece of timber—the tree from which it was cut would have been a magnificent sight. Imagine the vast forests of comparably-sized timber that was to be found scarcely a hundred years ago here in the pine belt of Southeastern Mississippi. But this log wasn’t what actually piqued my interest. It was the handwritten message below the photograph. It was hard to read at first, given the old-style cursive writing and the poor spelling, but as my wife, Gena, and I sat on the patio with our morning coffee, we took it as a challenge to decipher this caption. After debating this and that word for a few minutes, we were both aghast when we finally realized its full meaning.