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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My first motorcycle was a Honda 65 Scrambler—a screaming little machine. With all that its meager 65cc two-stroke engine could muster, it would top out at 65 mph—if I was going downhill, with a tailwind, and with nothing aboard more than my scrawny 140-pound young teenaged self. And I was going downhill that fateful day when a dog waylaid me and just about ended my short biking career.