Amongst Metropolites

For someone as country as I am, Oxford, Mississippi, my adopted hometown, is huge. Imagine how I felt when — after living fifty years in a Mississippi Delta hamlet, population fifty souls — I landed a desk job as an editor in megalopolis Memphis.

---

At the time I was an out-of-work cotton farmer who knew as much about editing as I did about dancing the lobster quadrille, but I remembered what my mentor, the old black man everyone called Jaybird, said about trying new things: You can do whatever you want — long as you don’t know you can’t. So, when a magazine that had accepted some of my stories offered a way to keep a roof over my head, not to mention a way to keep eating, I chunked my hoe in the back of Loretta, my beloved pickup, and headed to the big city. I soon discovered that learning to edit wasn’t nearly as traumatic as learning to coexist with city dwellers. The first time I pulled into a gas station, I found out right quick that you don’t just sign a ticket the way I did back home.

---

---

When I told the man behind the counter I was starting a new job right down the street and wanted to open an account and become one of his regular customers, he glared at me as if I was what I was — country-come-to-town — and pulled something from under the counter that looked more like a baseball bat than a charge booklet. Only once did he have to say, “cash only.” Driving in that car-clogged, concrete, cacophonous center of commerce was terrifying. Loretta is loaded, but one of her accessories I never had occasion to use on the streets of downtown Dunleith, Mississippi, was the cruise control. The manual says it won’t work below forty miles per hour, and I never had any reason to go faster than that. Go forty in Memphis and you become pavement. Folks will run over you. I’ve been to enough funerals to figure out that we all end up at the same place, so the logic of hurrying has always escaped me. Therefore, I found the urbanites’ need for speed especially mystifying. At first I thought they must really love working because in the mornings they were in a mad rush to get to work. But then I noticed in the afternoon they were in an even madder rush to get away from it. I have difficulty chewing tobacco and chopping cotton simultaneously, but the things Memphians do while driving at the same time is amazing. Men shave, sip coffee, and read the morning paper; women smoke, put on makeup, and talk on the phone. Vehicular roulette … that’s what it is. City folks have been known to take up rural residence and adapt quite well, but what you’ve heard about not being able to take the country out of country folks is true. I’m still the country boy I always was, even when I’m amongst metropolites.

---