Kinsler: The South welcomes prodigals back
The nominal purpose of this year’s traditional spring Daffodil trip was for Natalie (and spouse) to attend an obscure formal function at Mississippi State University’s business school, conveniently located some 700 miles southwest of our little house on East Mulberry Street. We hadn’t been back to Mississippi since we graduated in 1995, and Natalie wanted to flee far enough south for the sun to shine and daffodils to be in bloom. So we went, spending 14 hours in the Honda Accord wondering what our old haunts and friends might look like 20 years later and whether we’d feel at all welcome at this place where we lived and studied for so long.
We needn’t have worried, for the south, the original home of courtesy and kindness, always welcomes its prodigals back home. But 20 years is quite a long time in the life of a college, and few of our old professors and co-conspirators remained. That’s because most universities wisely encourage continuous renewal by never hiring their own graduates, instead scattering them like seeds from the mother tree to establish ministries elsewhere.
Mississippi State is a good school with a no-nonsense tradition, low tuition, a good graduate program in finance and the largest artificial lightning lab in academia, and Natalie and I wound up there after somehow deciding that our next adventure should be a stretch in graduate school. Though we were essentially foreign students (well, Yankees) they accepted both of us, apparently without later regret, and we’ve been on good terms with the old school ever since.
Its women are legendary: our friend Sharon, the very image of a Mississippi beauty queen with a degree from MSU’s rigorous computer engineering program, hasn’t changed an iota from the day we met her in 1990. We sat with her one afternoon at the tumble-down Little Dooey’s Barbeque near the campus and noted that no student — male, female, or otherwise — had a single tattoo. Not even the art students, we were assured. Sharon was amused at our astonishment. “Northerners,” we could hear her thinking, huge blue eyes rolling heavenward.
Yes, it’s a southern school with a football program, but athletics haven’t overwhelmed the institution. You learn humility when you’re a smallish member of the Southeastern Conference and regularly confront foes like Alabama, Texas, and Florida. And so Mississippi State students study, having little else to do out there in the rural south near the Alabama border, 90 miles from the nearest sin, as they like to say.
We unpacked our suits from Natalie’s fancy rolling garment bag and reported for duty at the formal banquet, where they were happy to see us. The next morning, rolling north and east through the flat, sunlit green fields, we wondered once again if there’d have been any way to stay in the south. But 20 years ago Ohio University offered Natalie a fine position, and a while later a house would be for sale on East Mulberry Street.
Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who finds himself camped with Natalie in a Mount Airy, North Carolina motel, soon to come home to five grouchy alley cats in Lancaster. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com.