You can go on foot from the far end of the Ole Miss campus to the edge of Oxford’s city limits in an hour and a half without stopping. Still, I’m taking my time, visiting the landmarks of my youth because I better understand the need to reflect on the process and the highs and lows of our experiences. The walk turns into a solo viewing of a documentary on my life—a window to my world, as I stop here and there, remembering the years that go by slowly as they happen but expeditiously once they’ve passed, leaving impressions that often determine how and where we go in the future.
To the unsuspecting, Oxford looks like an unshaken snow globe, except for once every three years when enough cold air in place meets moisture streaming in from the Gulf for snow crystals to form and accumulate. But I know the community like a cook knows a kitchen—the plates, under here, spices, there. I spent my youth wandering these streets, building a fortress with friends in this neighbor’s hedgerow from scraps found at the lumberyard, converting that university gymnasium without permission into our Boston Garden. These streets were a path to anywhere but home. Now, though, the streets are home again—despite the cliché from Thomas Wolfe’s novel published in 1940, You Can’t Go Home Again, that the past won’t be the same as it was if you try to return. But for me, thank God for that. The memories, though, linger, like a fruit that over-ripened, stench stealing the sweet.
Two years ago, I quit my news job in Alabama, goodbye John Archibald, goodbye Amy, goodbye my early chapters of destiny, the best job I’d had, to take a lesser job because the opportunity was in Oxford, the University of Mississippi’s hometown, because I felt I was running out of time, because I needed to get where I was meant to be to tell my story, our story. I was sure my road to destiny, the subsequent chapters, ran through there. The job was publisher of the small daily newspaper in Oxford, where I’d once worked under Miss Nina and Mr. Phillips. She and he were long dead and gone, and the families had sold the paper to the company that hired me. My responsibility was to grow the audience and keep it intact for as long as possible, allowing the owners to eventually slaughter the cattle herd one leg at a time. No spitting in the toilet, no driving the boss to lunch, but it was not far removed from the Miss Nina days, when advertisers in the small town had more influence in what made the paper than investigative journalism. It was more “watermelon carnival coming soon” that the owners desired, what’s known as service journalism, though I mixed in columns on student substance misuse, racial demographic shifts, and the need for more evenly spread statewide economics that don’t conveniently avoid Black and impoverished regions of the state.
I’d left behind John Archibald and the other hundred or so remaining journalists who’d bought into our digital conversation to buy time at a legacy newspaper that was headed for shrinkage and failure sooner than later no matter what I did because the move felt like part of the master plan. The idea was to take the job in Oxford, get closer to campus, and figure out a way to help students struggling with substance use disorder and mental health so we don’t lose someone else’s William, so we don’t almost lose someone else’s Hudson, so someone else’s Mary Halley doesn’t struggle. That work is well underway now, on campus—with plans of opening the William Magee Center for Wellness Education—and I’ve decided to quit my job, once again, leaving the publisher job at the Eagle, continuing to chase my destiny.
Kent’s not happy that I quit, again. Of course not. She’s scared, wondering if old, unreliable, impulsive David has returned. How will we pay our bills? But I’m not worried about that, because this new faith I’m experiencing says it will work out, some way, somehow, however it’s supposed to work out. I’m neither Doubting nor Dreaming these days, but living in the reality in the middle. I’m stronger than I’ve been, I say, and that’s true, though looking back now I know that stronger is not fully recovered.
Healing is a journey, not a destination, just as destiny is a journey, not an end. Sure, destiny presents as a place of finality, but in fact it is the events that will necessarily happen in the future to a person—meaning, it’s the path, not the place.
With time on my hands after quitting the paper, I walk the streets of my hometown. I know I’ll never write my story, and my family’s story, without facing what I’ve faced, how it happened in the first place. And I know this is why I left the paper, to have the needed time to reflect, to look back. To make sense of it all.
So, I walk. And I remember.
There’s my old house on University Avenue.
I look up the western side of my old house to the window of my room. The decals I put on the window in the eighth grade—one for LSU, where I went to basketball camp, and one for Ole Miss, where I hoped to play basketball—are gone, but in the distance, I can hear the boy with the knotty nipples crying for a truth beyond the legality and lies of a state’s adoption certificate.
Dad was married to Mom, but he pined for boys, which sapped his energy, and ours, only because of the effort required for cover-up. After dinner at five most weekdays, he’d watch the evening news from his La-Z-Boy at five-thirty, read a book in the La-Z-Boy at six, and fall asleep snoring in the La-Z-Boy by seven, except on the few nights one of the boys he’d invite over stopped by. Then he was all aflutter like springtime had arrived, supplanting his winter with one ding-dong at the door. Mom was married to Dad, but she pined for Ward Cleaver, which sapped her energy. She pretended everything was as it wasn’t, Eddie Haskell but in reverse, a good girl, but a confused girl.
I’ve denied wanting to find my biological father for as long as I recall, denying his identity mattered to me at all. I preferred to leave the lonely boy in his room, because I couldn’t imagine returning to pain for no apparent good reason when I was doing so well. But looking up at the window of my old room, hearing my soft sobs of days gone by wafting in the gentle breeze, I understand that the crying never truly stopped.
I’ve just been running from it, a boy lost in the wind.
———
Down University Avenue, onto Fraternity Row on campus. I’m outside the Sigma Nu house on campus looking into the courtyard. There’s the swimming pool, the only such one at an on-campus fraternity in America. It’s unusual, mixing water eight feet deep and concrete with machismo and rites of passage. Still, nobody has died in the pool yet. My son Hudson nearly died near the pool, though, choking on his vomit while sleeping in a hammock strung up along the fence after a night of substance bingeing as a college sophomore. He was twenty years old. Two decades and five years before, I’d stood in nearly the same spot and met Kent, his mother. We’d stood in swimsuits at a fraternity-sorority party, making googly eyes at one another as children, first-year students, on our first day of class, and four years later, we were making a family together.
My closest friendships still run through that house, too. Mike, my roommate and pledge brother, would walk from Jackson to Oxford for me if I needed, and I’d do the same for him in reverse. When I got sick and fell, alcohol and prescription Adderall joining force with shame and guilt to overwhelm me like a slow-moving, category five hurricane, Mike never left my side. He didn’t pass judgment, against me, against Kent. He didn’t give advice.
He was just there.
“Tell me, how are you?” he asked.
William followed his mother and me to Ole Miss and me to the Sigma Nu fraternity chapter, pledging twenty-four years later, and Hudson followed William two years after him. Through observation and stories told, I understood they had much the same experience I did, the fraternity serving a greater good with friendships and structure. Still, things had changed for college students. They’d arrived with similar family baggage, parents in a divorce, a father battling addiction. But they had smoked marijuana since early high school, three to four times stronger and more addictive than what was around when I was in college. They had smart-phones and social media in their hands and minds, prescription pills like Xanax passed around like candy, and expectations from parents to be better than they were, and nothing less. These changes make youth harder, more a matter of life or death.
It’s why you’ve come home, William says, and I know he’s right.
———
There’s the circa 1928 house we purchased on Van Buren Avenue, three blocks off the town square and adjoining university property. Still the same color we painted it in remodel. Even in our early days of marriage, Kent and I made an excellent match in real estate, avoiding the stress that plagues some couples, fighting over a shower fixture or cost overruns, and easily agreeing on when to buy, when to sell, and how much to invest in renovation. I got the deals done, and she got the look done.
We moved into the house with William, nearly two, and Hudson, four months, in late 1991. Mary Halley joined us there in 1994, rounding out our family of five before my acne had completely disappeared. We remodeled the attic, adding a bedroom and bath. I’d sworn—until we eventually sold the house in 1998 to tackle a circa 1893 renovation project on the other side of the square—despite how the sagging original wood in our main bedroom floors had cracks and holes that let sunlight peer through like a kaleidoscope, that it was a forever home. I’d pledged the same for the replacement, too, the 1893 redo, but that didn’t last long, either.
I’d meant well, with such promise—my attempt at normalcy, or what I thought normal should look like. I thought staying in one house meant stability because that’s what my parents and Kent’s parents did, and that’s what most people did. I figured Kent and our three children deserved that, a husband and father with standing in the community, which meant the local bankers would loan on signature to $50,000 and practically any amount for home purchase with signature and a lien even if the income and credit score didn’t match up. I planned to win the father of the year award—remodeling our home, winning a city council seat, coaching youth sports, teaching young-adult Sunday School, signing for and paying back those loans. All to prove that I wasn’t a doesn’t-belong bastard who only got to town because he needed a home at three months old, operating under pretenses of a name that wasn’t originally his. Being father of the year meant no crazy.
———
I’m standing outside my old junior high school. It’s air-conditioned now, I see, likely working from the fifth or sixth unit by now, since forty years have passed since I strode to the stage in clown shoes, with throbbing pimples and a deflated ego to accept an award someone else deserved.
I walk toward the cafetorium, the one new thing we had in our school. It’s now the oldest among the new, with recent remodeling in every direction. I tug on the door. It opens. The lights are on. I look to the stage and picture myself there.
I cringe, closing my eyes.
Dad, William says, you aren’t fourteen.
“I know. You’re right.”
I hear his chuckle.
Of course, he’s right. I’d arrived at this building as a seventh-grade student with a full head of hair and but a few soft, dark ones sprouting from underneath my armpits. A couple of years later, I was half man, half boy, and completely lost, winning an award I didn’t deserve, staring out the window, trying to understand the storms to come. Now, the hair on my head recedes, lining up with my ears, and my chest takes partial cover under a wiry, graying mat that can’t hide the fact that my right breast and nipple are long gone courtesy of a mastectomy due to cancer, estrogen positive. It’s the experiences I’ve had, as we all have, in the spaces and time between that define who I am, that define what I have to offer. We are shaped, after all, more by what happens to us than by what we do.
I’m drawn to storytelling that benefits others, emerging as my purpose, and passion, because of my childhood, because of my experiences in college, in marriage, as a father, in addiction, in a midlife crisis. One has everything to do with another, of course, because we wield our pain that way in life, not because we want to, but because we are unaware, until we are. That’s why, years before, when I tried storytelling as a profession, as a newspaper editor, as a business book author, I was mediocre at best, missing the zest that comes with experience parlayed into information, knowledge, and passion worth sharing with others.
I told stories that belonged to others, and therefore, I could only deliver them so well. I only wanted to deliver them so well. But these stories that I’m reminded of, reconnecting with my hometown, with my university, are my stories worth telling, not because anyone should be interested in my life, but because they can help others better understand their life, their challenges, and their experiences.
This, William says, is your story. It’s your destiny. Speak it, write it. Live it.
I’m listening, thinking back to the message I’d sent Esmond, my agent, telling him I’d write my next book about family and healing. Maybe that wasn’t crazy at all. Perhaps, it’s like most of life—it’s all about the timing, and place. Destiny doesn’t typically happen when leaves first appear in spring. The brilliance of fall happens much later. It happens when it’s ready, just as destiny happens when we’re ready.