I don’t have to tell you, life is not always tidy. Stuff happens. It’s a simple existential observation, similar to c'est la vie: life is full of unpredictable events. Incidents and accidents sneak up on the best of us, particularly when we least expect it. The worst of these events can leave permanent scars or long-lasting trauma. But if you’re lucky, they won’t be that serious and the grief and anguish will be short-lived, leaving you with interesting stories to tell. Like the time when I was 11 and Daddy, Keith, and I and JoJo, Daddy’s best bird dog, were in the cab of our pickup riding down an old road—an overgrown path, really—a couple of miles from our home in Big Level.

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My vinyl collection has some iconic rock albums (Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Highway 61 Revisited), some of which I’ve acquired in recent years. However, my most cherished albums are those that I received in my initial shipment from Columbia House Record Club in the spring of 1970. I remember going to the mailbox and finding a good-sized package containing CSNY’s Déjà Vu, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, Three Dog Night’s It Ain’t Easy, Santana’s Abraxas, CCR’s Green River and Cosmo’s Factory, and others. In large part, those albums defined me at that stage of my life.

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One summer night in 1970, I was tooling into town on my new motorcycle, thinking I might head over to the Frosty Mug to see who was hanging out there. Just past the 3-way stop where Clubhouse Drive intersects with Pine Street, I noticed the lights of a car on my tail. Since I wasn't going very fast, I figured that whoever it was needed to get around me. My solution was to speed up and make a quick turn onto a side street. That was a mistake, one of several I made in short order.

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In the summer of ’69, in July, right after I’d gotten back from a week’s trip to a church youth camp in Arkansas, Mama surprised me by announcing that she was going to Europe on a two-week educational tour. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. What are the rest of us going to do? Mama had it all worked out. John and Karen and Linda would stay with Judy and Glen; Keith and I would stay at home and hold down the fort. I liked the sound of that, but Mama or anybody else planned on a Cat 5 hurricane barreling down on Big Level.

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I was out for my afternoon walk through the neighborhood a few days ago. As I passed by the small lake at the halfway point of my usual route, I counted the geese (8 that day) and turned to come down Beverly Lane, a street with several families with children. Just past the new house under construction, I spotted a gaggle of young boys with a baseball and gloves. Without breaking stride, I waved and walked on. After I’d gotten 20 yards or so past them, I heard one of the boys say to another, “You go get it.” to which came the reply, “No, you get it. You threw it.” And then at that moment I saw it. The baseball came rolling down the street right between my legs. Without looking back, I hollered, “I’ll get it!” Whereupon I walked on to where the ball came to rest in the gutter another 20 yards farther. I picked it up, turned and threw a fine, low arcing pitch that landed with a pop in the middle of the glove of the youngster who had stepped out in front of the others. “Thanks,” he said. I grinned then turned and continued my walk. I had gone just a few more paces when, another boy from the pack shouted, “Nice throw, Lefty!” Well, that just made my day!

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A little over a year ago I started this blogging website with no clear expectations for what it would become. In my welcome statement on the homepage, I stated my modest reasons for wanting to do this at this stage of my life. I admitted that whether I found an audience didn’t matter, that I was really doing it for myself. While true enough, that statement wasn’t entirely true. Deep down, I knew that the only real meaning for me to come from this endeavor would be if I could somehow reach others, even a handful of readers, who could relate to what I was trying to say by the sharing some of my most precious memories, both the sweet and the bittersweet. Well, I’m here to tell you, that has happened in a way that has been most gratifying and a continual amazement to me. In my very first blog piece, titled “The Burden of Memory,” I said that recent events had changed me in ways I didn’t see coming. And now I have come to find that a new and unexpected set of recent events has again changed me in ways I didn’t see coming.

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Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald, 14 Jun 1921, p8: “PARTY ENJOYS FISH FRY: A small party from Big Level enjoyed an outing on Red Creek last Wednesday near the City Bridge. The chief sport was fishing until a nice lot was caught, after which they were cooked and eaten. Then those who cared for that kind of sport took advantage of the nice warm water of Red Creek by going in bathing. Not each member of the party succeeded in capturing a fish, but the number of fish caught exceeded by far the number of anglers, a fact for which all of the party felt thankful immediately after grace was said. Those making up the party were: Mr. and Mrs. D. A. Lott, Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Lott. Mr. and Mrs. B. A. Lott and children, Mr. and Mrs. H. P. Breland, Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Bond and Misses Pearl and Zena Bond, and Elva Lott.” This little item appeared in the Big Level News column of the Daily Herald newspaper exactly one hundred years ago last week. What thrilled me so when I saw it is that these are my people—my grandparents and some of their siblings and niblings who are my great aunts and uncles and cousins.

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Her plain, homemade dress may have been a bit tattered but it was clean. Her black hair was graying and done up under a do-rag. Behind her pleasant smile, her unmade-up ebony features were nondescript. She was humming as she worked the string mop and foot tub around the splintered pine-wood floors of our old house, her plump five-foot frame swishing with every stroke of the mop. And I, barely one year old, was toddling underfoot with Mary’s every step.

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As a kid, along with my brothers and cousins, I played all over the pastures and woodlands surrounding our corner of heaven in Upper Big Level. We spent as much time as we could in the sandy hollows and boggy branches, the springs and cow ponds on and adjacent to our 40-acres, as well as roaming through the piney thickets and sagebrush clearings between our place and Granddaddy’s and Uncle ’Nell’s farms just a mile away. But, even though it held a lot of mystery and attraction for us, there was one place where we didn’t play. That was along Kirby Creek. It was thick and swampy, abounding in snakes and other ominous creatures. It was just too spooky down there.

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An item about new ground in the Big Level News section of an old 1915 issue of the Daily Herald newspaper put me in mind of a major project that was left unfinished with my dad’s untimely death in March of 1967. The previous fall Daddy had decided that Keith and I, his two oldest and now teenaged sons, could profit from a truck patch of cucumbers. It would give us something to do, he said. Plus, cukes have been bringing a good price at the pickle factory in town, he said.

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“Russell, your mama just called. She said it was time for you to get on home.” Aunt Reicey didn’t have to tell me twice as I’d just realized that Uncle ’Nell had just come in from work. I hadn’t heard him drive up, but if he was home that meant that Daddy was home, too. Yep, I thought, I’d better scoot! With a quick ’bye to Jerry, I hopped on my bicycle and tore out toward home, just a short mile away. I was about halfway up the road to our house, almost to the old Hatten house, when I began to really feel the blazing, canicular heat of that late-summer afternoon. I was pedaling as hard as I could when I met Daddy’s truck coming down the road. As it approached me, I could see that the whole family was in it. The whole family! Have mercy! Surely, they were coming for me. What was the urgency? Was I in trouble?

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In my last post I described what is now an annual Lott family tradition in which I create and distribute a mix CD with a dozen or so songs that share a mystery commonality. As I stated, for a few years now I’ve also been sharing the playlists with a few of my music-minded friends, and now with my blog site as a platform, I presented my first My Back Pages mystery mix to a wider audience. Now with the deadline I set for entries having expired, I’m ready to announce the winner and reveal the solution. . . . [Drum Roll] . . . The winner is . . .

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Several years ago, 12 or 13 years now, I created a mix CD with a dozen or so of my favorite tunes and placed unnamed copies of the disc in each of my family’s Christmas stockings—in each adult’s stocking, that is, as my grandsons were then still quite small. Each track on the playlist shared a commonality that I didn’t reveal; however, I included a crossword puzzle I created that they could use to discover the playlist's mystery theme. This game proved to be a lot of fun. And I’ll add, it also stirred up some good-natured sisterly rivalry. As Christmas approached the following year, they asked if I could do another. And so, an annual family tradition was born.

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A few days ago, my friend Charley and I were discussing, via email, the overt sexual content of some of the popular rock ‘n’ roll songs of the 1970s. What prompted the exchange was the choice I’d made for the Song of the Day in a recent blog post. Mind you, it wasn’t the song that I chose, it was the one I didn’t choose. Though highly evocative and nostalgic, I didn’t select it because I felt the lyrics were overtly titillating and inappropriate for the story I was telling. [Drop me an email if you want to know the name of that song.] As our email exchange continued, we traded comments about euphemisms and the way in which some terms that were once considered vulgarities have worked their way into commonly accepted speech. This topic reminded me of an incident from my high school days that I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about. It was embarrassing then and it haunts me somewhat even now.

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A few months ago, right before the pandemic struck, at a restaurant here in Hattiesburg, I bumped into an old classmate from my Home School days in Big Level. Delaney Walker and his family were coming into Ed’s Burgers as my wife and I were leaving. I didn’t recognize him and would’ve walked right on by had he not spoken, greeting me by name. Even then I couldn’t place him or recall his name. Thankfully, he sensed my confusion and introduced himself. I was struck, awed really, with how quickly he recognized me, particularly in that we had not seen each other in five decades.

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I love October. I always have. Here in south Mississippi, October is when we finally begin to see the high temps of summer taper off with some delightfully cool mornings, pleasantly warm afternoons, and deliciously chilly nights. With its fair skies, often cloudless, October is a great time to be out of the house, whether working or playing; even yardwork becomes a pleasurable chore. Growing up in Big Level, there were always plenty of opportunities to be outside in October. And the fair weather of our Deep South fall season seemed to heighten things, whatever the experience. There was football, camping trips, and the county fair. There was hay to be hauled. And one time there was a snake . . .

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I’ve previously written about my summer’s deep-dive into the old issues of the Daily Herald, the Biloxi-Gulfport newspaper, specifically looking for the columns and other articles written by my Great-great Uncle Crab Breland. His weekly, and sometimes twice-weekly, output was enough to keep me plenty busy, but the task took much longer that I anticipated as I was continually distracted from the target of my research by the many fascinating articles that were the news of the day some 100 years ago in Big Level and Wiggins and the surrounding southeast Mississippi and larger area. Almost every issue had something that caught my eye and threw me off track.

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For the past several weeks I’ve been deep-diving through the archives of newspapers.com reading the columns that my Great-great-uncle Crab Breland wrote for the Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald newspaper for almost forty years. The weekly columns began around 1910 or so and quickly drew a loyal audience and did much to put Big Level on a larger map.

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“Son, I told you to get dressed! Now get a move on; we’re gonna be late! And put those catalogs back where they belong -- you’re not getting a motorcycle any more than you’re getting an airplane.”
Daddy’s words, urgent and somewhat harsh, brought me up fast off my bed. Even though I knew that he knew I would be ready for church well before the girls, it was that last part that really stung.

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I started my public school education in September 1959 as a five-year-old at Home School in the heart of Big Level in Stone County. That was back when the law allowed first-graders to enroll if their sixth birthday occurred before the end of the calendar year — my birthday is in October. From its beginnings in 1912 and throughout its 60-year life, Home School saw many changes — buildings burned or torn down and replaced, new ones added, the addition of a high school (it originally went only to the 10th grade) and many others. While there were also a few name changes, always reflecting the current state or local educational climate, at the time of my enrollment, according to the sign above the front doors, it was named Home Vocational High School. Regardless of the changes that came before and those still to come, it was always known as Home.

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