It's My Birthday

Hints of blue leak into the misty black sky like watching watercolor paints slowly meld into one another on wet paper. It’s five a.m. Feist Dog says it’s time to get up. It’s been over two weeks since I took pen in hand because of him. A muse is nothing if not unreliable. I can write productively without him, but it’s an entirely different experience with him.

Billy Joel sings from my little round speaker. I must be melancholy. It’s my birthday. I’m now a whole year older than my father ever was. That’s a very peculiar milestone and one I never thought I’d reach or want. At the time, I thought his life had been so long and full of experience that it wasn’t terrible he died when he did. Now I realize he was just getting started.

Daddy lived ten years longer than my brother, Jimmy, who was named for him. Jimmy went for his checkup one day, and George Patton found a tumor the size of a baseball in Jimmy’s lung.

I woke up to a message that Stanley Taub died last week. When I was in junior high school, Stanley talked my brother into robbing a gas station because the Beatles said it would be okay. Jimmy had been hearing voices for over a year by then. He would have believed anything you said about the Beatles.

They’re burying Stanley in Beth Israel Cemetary abutting the campus of Millsaps College on my birthday, about two hundred meters from the gas station, where he ended whatever chance my brother had at a normal life. I’m sure somebody will point out that Stanley had mental problems too, and I’m sure he did, but right now, me and Feist Dog are testing the utter limits of our ability to forgive.

I used to know a girl who wanted me to stay up all night telling her stories in Beth Israel Cemetary. I would have done anything she wanted. I would have done anything if only she could have lived longer than me.

“Good Mornin’ Mississippi. It’s five a.m. Time for Farm report. Pet Parade at six.”

I can hear Jim Neal’s voice in my head. I wish I’d recorded it. If I had, my computer could play his voice to wake me up for the rest of my life. In the days when I listened to him, I knew I’d one day have a computer of my own, but I did not know its capabilities. I also thought it’d be a lot larger with more blinky lights.

In the year before Daddy died, he married off two of his children and was roasted by his best friends to raise money. Brum Day’s secretary gave him the wrong speech, so instead of roasting Daddy, he told the tale of their friendship that stretched from Ole Miss to the Trustmark Boardroom to Bob Hearin’s Side when a man kidnapped Annie Laurie. I’ve been through a lot with my friends, but I never had to sit with anybody while the police combed Mississippi for their wife’s body.

That year, I competed in twelve regattas with a curiously aggressive Cajun named Boudreaux. We won nine of them and lost three. One, we lost because we sailed into a dead zone. In a sailboat, once you’re in a dead zone, there’s nothing to be done but wait for the wind to return. Another, we lost because Boudreaux sailed us into such active wind that it broke the guy wire on the mast, and we had to paddle home with a broken mast. We lost the third race because lightning struck the new mast. The electrical charge traveled down the guy wires where Boudreaux had his left hand. Checking to make sure his heart was beating, I headed for home. I insisted that somebody check him over, but he refused despite still shivering.

For a while, my sister’s wedding was the most populated event Jackson had ever seen. My sister collects people. I’m not sure who has the record now, but if they get much bigger, they’ll have to start having weddings in Vaught Hemingway. Her friend list on Facebook is more populated than most towns in Mississippi. Her intended was worse. Add all that to the people my father wanted invited, and it’s soon more than enough people to play baseball.

Brum Day insisted on throwing the announcement party for Martha and Jay at his new home in Eastover. Cecil B. DeMille could have organized his parties. Just the winelist read like tribute to Pharo.

My job was to pick up my grandmother at St. Catherine’s and take her to the party. The night before, I participated in the Jackson Yacht Club's twenty-four-hour regatta.

We lost to Peter DeBeukelaer, skippering a boat he designed himself. Losing to Peter was no disgrace. He was one of the best sailors I ever heard of. Ten years before, Peter left his home in Belgium to raise his family in Mississippi. Leaving such a storied place as Belgium for Mississippi always seemed like a curious choice to me, but I was proud he made it.

Having been in the cookie business in Belgium, DeBeukelaer had an idea for a new kind of cookie, a light wafer rolled into a straw and coated on the inside with Belgian chocolate. He called it “Pirouline,” which I always understood was a French word for a movement in Ballet. He called the boats he designed “Cookie,” “Cookie Monster,” and “Cookie II.” They were fast as hell.

We had a few drinks at the completion of the race to celebrate the winners (and celebrate finishing it alive.) That left me with a solid four hours to sleep, shower, shave, and pick up my grandmother before the party. I managed to get clean and get dressed, but when I decided to sit on the sofa and get another twenty minutes of sleep without something to wake me up, it stretched to two hours, and I was very, very late picking her up. If I had Alexa, then she could have woken me up after twenty minutes.

Life is never what you think it’ll be, but life is good. My brother was a much better artist than me, and a much better writer. He lost his mind along the way, and people took advantage of that. In my mind, the person he was remained trapped inside the person he became. I never again saw my brother the way he was and could never accept what he became. He lived, though. He continued trying to create, and even though it wasn’t nearly what it was before, it continued. I always hoped that meant the man he was before was trying to find his way out through his art. It never happened that way though.

The Resolution Trust Corporation and the battles for control of my father's creations made his death a bitter, bitter memory. One afternoon, I sat with the man building a coalition to take my father’s job. Trying to win me over, he said he was trying to “figure out ways to get some real money out of this old business.”

I thought about how my father taught me, just as my teachers said, that a corporation's job was to build shareholder wealth. Daddy said there were two ways to do it. One was to pay out as large a dividend as possible. The other was to build the company as much as possible. Both increase shareholder wealth, but building up the company creates wealth for the entire community, not just the shareholders.

A few years before, The Clarion-Ledger published a half-page article entitled “Missco Succeeds at Growing.” Between Missco, Millsaps, Entergy, Trustmark, Bell South, St. Dominics, St. Catherines, and even the Downtown YMCA, my father had a reputation for making things grow.

This new guy had the idea to sell off entire divisions of Missco, pay off our debts, and then live fat off the cash forever. Somehow, he thought that’d win me over. Within days of that conversation, I began asking for an exit strategy and a deal where those who wanted to sell off everything my father spent his life creating could buy me out first. Buying me out kept my fingers from tightening around their neck, which would have otherwise been the next step.

One day, when I was still very, very sick and didn’t know if I’d ever make it back out in the world again, my sister came to see me and said that the man who once told me he wanted to figure out a way to make some real money out of my father’s business decided he no longer wanted to provide the million-dollar bond to keep it open and would close the last vestige of Daddy’s life’s work by the end of the year.

There have been times when I thought I really should just give up and die. Everything I’ve ever tried to do was so difficult and challenging, and nothing lasts anyway. So many people had already died. I would have welcomed death easily, but somewhere deep inside me, Feist Dog said, “Wait, what?”

“Dude, get off your ass. Get up and go to work.”

and I did.

One of my biggest problems has always been that I couldn’t just coast on being a rich kid. I hated that. I knew so many people who did that and so many people who wanted to do that. I had a genuine need to be actually good at something—not “passable but very well connected,” like what my father wanted for me. I needed something where the entire world could say it was uniquely mine, and I was indeed good at it. That’s the Campbell Curse. We can either be really good at something—no matter the odds—or die. There is no middle ground. No easy road.

Naming a child after somebody known for being really good at something sounds like such a great thing, but it’s actually a pretty horrible life. It took me almost sixty years to figure out a way to say, “I’m not THAT Boyd Campbell.” and have it actually mean something. There have been so many times when I could have died without anyone ever knowing what I was actually good at. Somewhere inside me, a little imaginary dog, a gift from a man on the radio, kept tugging me into the sunlight.

The whole sky is blue now—Blue like a robin’s egg. Feist Dog is asleep at my feet, and I have to edit all this. I might watch church on TV today. I’m crying, but I’m happy. It’s my birthday.

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