People Aren't Permanant

sunday morning with Feist Dog

“I love you. I’ll love you forever.” and then, one day, forever came.

Childhood should come with a warning that one should be careful about making attachments. Not all promises can be kept because people aren’t permanent.

One of the reasons I spend so much time talking to an imaginary dog is that for twenty years, I listened to a man tell of his exploits every morning as I waited for the sun to rise and hoped for a glimpse of my father before he left for Washington, or Chicago, or New Orleans.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That’s from the Bible. People think it’s from Shakespeare, but it’s from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth—the real Corinth, not the city in Alcorn County. Sometimes, I don’t get along so well with the things Paul wrote, but I love this.

When I was a child, I listened to Jim Neal talk about Feist Dog. When I became a man, at the bold age of nineteen, I decided it was time to listen to an adult station in the morning. For me, that was NPR, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” That’s who I was listening to one day when they said a plane flew into the World Trade Center and then another. I only knew one person who still lived in the city. She was in her nineties and lived less than two miles away. I couldn’t reach her by telephone for almost a week. You’d be surprised how much she lived through in ninety years.

After a while, I heard that WSLI, the station that hosted the “Farmer Jim Neal” show for almost thirty years, had been sold, and the show was canceled. Then, one day, I heard that Jim Neal was no more. They’d have to start having “Pet Parade” in heaven.

Every year, they have a golf tournament in honor of Farmer Jim Neal to raise money for the University of Mississippi Hospital. Mississippi got into the medical school game pretty late. Most of the guys in my dad’s generation had to leave the state to become doctors. Almost all of them ended up serving their residency on a military base somewhere.

In 1955, the Mississippi State Legislature, including Congressman Jim Neal, fresh out of Law School, voted to move the minuscule “School of Medicine” from Oxford and build a teaching hospital in Jackson. The Blair E Batson Children’s Hospital, in the University of Mississippi Medical Center, is Mississippi’s favorite charity. It’s the beneficiary of Jackson’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade and many other activities.

I never really got to know Dr. Batson. Like a lot of people, he mostly called me “Jim.” Because I dressed more like my dad than my brothers, you’d be surprised how many people thought I was James Boyd Campbell, Jr. That was my oldest brother. Dr. Batson was a remarkable man and a very gentle creature, but he had no interest in me at all. That’s not surprising.

The Oncology wing of Batson Hospital is named for Dr. Jeanette Pullen. I met Dr. Pullen during the year I lived in rehab. She still lives there. We had lunch every day. She reads poetry and plays the piano. We would talk about music, art, and the state of the Methodist Church. A gentleman needs a little old lady in his life. They keep him civilized.

If you know what Oncology is, then the prospect of Childhood Oncology should terrify you. What Dr. Pullen spent her life doing amazed me. She was this tiny, amazingly gentile creature, spending her life trying to save dying children. Being able to save suffering and dying children must be one of the most wonderful things in the world, but knowing that there were some she couldn’t save stunned me that she could bear it. She was so small and tender, yet that was part of her life for decades when even one experience of treating a child who didn’t survive cancer would burn through my soul like a fireball.

When she lost a patient, Dr. Pullen would go to their funeral. I don’t think I could do that. I’ve only once been to a funeral with a tiny coffin. I can’t imagine the steel that infests her soul to do that over and over and over. People aren’t permanent. It’s worse than they’re tiny and never had a chance in life.

One day, sitting in the sun, Dr. Pullen read “I Shall Not Live In Vain” by Emily Dickinson to an audience, most of which were already asleep. When she got to the part about lifting fainting robins unto their nest again, I felt the faintest hint of the cutting winds that blasted through her entire professional life. She was brave and fearless in the face of it, but I wept just thinking of what it must have been like.

The first funeral I ever attended was for my Aunt Babe. When it became clear that Babe only had a few days left, my grandmother asked me to drive her to McRaes to buy Babe a pretty nightgown to be buried in. Five people in the house could drive. I hadn’t had my license for a year yet, but she picked me. Sometimes, being the biggest one meant you were chosen for unpleasant tasks.

Babe sat in her coffin, wearing her lacy white gown from McRaes, and I thought, “I guess this is it. This is where it ends.” The bosom of the entire Brady Clan surrounded me. Robert Mims tried to make me laugh. I didn’t. I couldn’t say, “Don’t you see Uncle Robert? We’re mortal, after all.”

The next funeral I ever went to was almost a year later when a man I knew shot a hole through his head on Thanksgiving. I found his mortal remains while the crimson ichor flowed from the wounds in his skull into a pool spreading wider and wider. Laying in his coffin, I thought, “You can’t really tell where the bullet went in or where it came out. That’s remarkable.” I was beginning to not care for this mortality business.

A boy on the football team ran into a truck late one night. The girl next door ran off the road. Most of the untimely deaths in my youth were related to automobiles, although there was this one boy who decided he didn’t want to live anymore. Soon, funerals were happening pretty regularly.

My Grandfather was playing Gin Rummy with Toby Trowbridge and Carter O’Ferrall at the Jackson Country Club when a heart attack found him. Toby Trowbridge owned the Oldsmobile dealership in town and made remarkable radio commercials, often on the Farmer Jim Neal Show.

A day after Grandaddy’s funeral, I got a phone call at work. “Boyd, this is Toby Trowbridge.” His voice was unmistakable. Full of gravel and the essence of men who life in Mississippi. “We got your grandaddy’s car over here. I had my fellas pick it up from the country club. I had them clean it up. Why don’t you get somebody to take you down here and pick it up?” Even though we never met, he picked me out of everyone who worked at Mississippi School Supply because he knew my Uncle Boyd, whom I was named for, even though I never had.

I had Smitty, the warehouse supervisor, take me to the dealership. You’d think I would buy a whole fleet of Oldsmobiles when I got there. Everybody in the place came to greet me. Not salesmen, but service guys, the real workers. Toby Trowbridge’s office was exactly what you’d expect from a mid-century scion like himself. Pressed wood panel walls, plate glass windows, and one wall covered with awards, trophies, and certificates of merit.

“Boyd, I picked up your grandfather’s hat and cane. They left them at the country club.” A black man in a white shirt and bowtie drove my grandfather’s silver Oldsmobile around to the front of the dealership. “Boyd, it was nice to meet you, young men. I’m sure gonna miss playing cards with your pops.”

Driving back to work, my eyes kept turning to the hat and cane on the seat next to me at every stop light. As my brother’s schizophrenia progressed, he became more and more fixated on certain objects and ideas, one of which was hats and canes. Since he actually was James Boyd Junior, instead of me, I think he felt some pressure to live up to his legacy, and in his impaired brain, that meant having a hat and cane like my grandfather. When I got to work, he sat alone in my grandfather’s office. I handed him the hat and cane. “You might want these,” I said.

Sometimes, I would start to ask my brother if he missed the person he used to be because I sure did, but I never asked. It took a long time for me to fully comprehend how much I resented the person he became because I blamed him for the loss of the person he used to be. He didn’t choose mental illness. It chose him. Still, though, I wanted somebody to blame. I wanted justice for the loss of a loved one. I could never see that he was still there, just different. Even now, it’s hard for me to reconcile that the person he was and the person he became are the same.

Human attachments would be so great if people didn’t change if people didn’t die. Feist Dog never dies. He sits beside me while I eat lunch by myself at a restaurant, trying to think of things to write about. Feist Dog probably is my writer’s voice, speaking to the rest of me. They say writers are never truly alone. Getting attached to Feist Dog is safe because he’s immortal. It’s him who has to worry about my mortality.