Moving Forward With My Head Turned Back: Why I’m So Pumped to Read at Lemuria
Here’s the deal.
I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but spent most of my life nearly positive that the two kindest people in the world lived in Jackson, Mississippi. Well, they lived in Jackson first and then Brandon, although they never moved. It seemed instead that Lakeland Drive simply turned from some dusty stretch of potholes into a thick and black electrical cord, plugging downtown Jackson into the folks out near the Ross Barnett Reservoir, many of whom, once juiced, said, “Wait a second, we moved out here for a reason!” I think they (the royal “they” and not my grandparents in particular) even kicked up enough dust to have the address officially changed in order to clear up any confusion that they might live in a place that had crime, litter, and interstates. I’m no Jacksonian scholar, though, so this could be wrong. All I know is that my clumsily printed birthday cards to “Maw Maw Rebie” and “Paw Paw Milton” started coming back returned if I wrote Jackson, MS, and not Brandon. And so it strikes me now that the Mississippi P.O. may have been my first editor.
Anyway, a few things about these saints: my grandfather, Milton Walsh, was a retired oil and gas man and my grandmother, Rebie Walsh, was an artist. Both were insane golfers. My grandfather, I believe, could have gone pro if he had any interest in competing. He seemed more interested in telling knock-knock jokes in the rough areas around the green, though, and talking sincerely with strangers in the clubhouse. Still, he was the only man I ever knew who could shoot his age on the golf course. This is no small deal. My grandmother was skilled, too, but also disinterested in the competition. She’s instead spent the second half of her life throwing herself whole hog into any artist endeavor she could find; oil painting, drawing, paper-making and, once she got past seventy, memoir writing. To be honest, she was pretty damn good at most of this stuff; and a few of her works now hang out in storage areas of Mississippi museums, some future call to relevance not impossible.
But whenever I would visit them as a child during hot summers they’d lay aside every personal pursuit to entertain me. For years it was the zoo. Then the water park by the Reservoir. That old toy store right off I-55. As I grew up, though, all three of us felt the shine of these places wear off and we searched for new avenues of connection. I began duffing around the links with my grandfather. We ate at every new restaurant they could find (nearly always Mexican, though I had no idea why). Then, my grandmother noticed how much I was reading; often slinking off to my bedroom to flip through comic books as a kid, Stephen King novels as a teenager, and then starting to scribble some of my own ideas down as a young man, and she told about this place called “Lemuria”. I was immediately interested. For those in the know; this word glowed to me like Araby.
So, we went, and the next ten years of my life were some of the best. Every visit to Jackson was punctuated by a trip to Lemuria and lunch at the sandwich shop below. I’d gone through college and a graduate degree in literature at this point and eventually moved to Oxford, MS, for an MFA at Ole Miss. Every few months I’d stop in Jackson on my drive back down to Baton Rouge to go to Lemuria with my grandparents. And as my personal reading tastes were now coming into their own, my appreciation for this amazing bookstore multiplied. I got past the stacks and asked permission into the locked room of collectibles with my grandmother in tow. I carefully handled books that cost more than I would make that entire semester on my graduate stipend. Still, with her help, I began my modest collection, buying things like first edition Barry Hannah’s and a first edition of Rock Springs, by Richard Ford. I knew at those moments, more than ever before, what I wanted to do with my life.
And, during this time, I also got lucky. I had a few stories published in anthologies like Blue Moon Café and French Quarter Fiction that allowed me, as a doofus in his late twenties, to read and sign books at Lemuria. I was, of course, humbled and felt a fraud. Still, my grandparents attended these casual events in nice clothes and I remember Rebie taking about thirty pictures of me as I just sat at a table with some other writers, signing stock. I was not embarrassed by this, though it was embarrassing. I loved them and understood that they loved me. But when her pictures came back, all blurry, every one of them, almost unrecognizable, I knew that I wouldn’t have much longer to spend with them. And I was right.
Gone five years from us now (Rebie passing of a broken heart a year after losing Milton), I was already at work on the stories that now appear in my book The Prospect of Magic when they died. One of the stories in the collection, The Freddies, I began writing in that very same bedroom in Brandon, Mississsippi, on the day of my grandfather’s funeral. In the months that followed that event, while editing the story, I found myself trying to talk my grandmother into reasons to keep going. Her health was failing, her house was empty, and I knew I was waging a losing battle. Still, I’d say things to her like, “You can’t go anywhere. I want you to be there for my wedding, for when I have a kid, for when I get a book out and read at Lemuria.”
And it likely seems improbable to most that a bookstore event would be listed alongside things like birth and marriage; but it wasn’t for us. We’d discovered something cool about one another (as people and not just kin) among the stacks at Lemuria and we both knew it. And even as I type this I can remember the smell of their station wagon as we drove the long stretch up Lakeland Drive, from Castlewoods to Banner Hall, to the bookstore, and I remember the rosary lying in the small change cup by the automatic stick shift.
All this to say that I was lucky to have them then like I am lucky to have them now. And, although neither Milton or Rebie will be in attendance when I do get the chance to read and sign from my own book at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 9th, I’ll imagine her snapping photos of me the whole time, him fumbling with a golf tee in his pocket, both happy to be back in Jackson and smiling, like I am.
M. O. Walsh’s website
