Kevin Walters – on coming back to Hattiesburg.

Hattiesburg, Mississippi
October 25, 2000

Cheryl:

Whenever I get down – and over the last year, as you well know, I’ve been way down – I go see my dad. The other day I stopped by and he was in his underwear doing laundry. Usually my mom does the laundry but since she broke her foot he’s helping out. He even went to Wal-Mart to buy groceries last week, but it was his first time in a grocery store of any kind in the last twenty years, and he couldn’t find anything and got in a fight with “one a dem $5-ah-hour jokers, the kind who couldn’t find their butts with a pair of deer antlers in each hand.” You know the type, Cheryl. Guys like me.

So the dog and I drove over to find him doing laundry in his underwear – and out of milk. In his BVD’s, white undershirt and long, pale legs Dad looked like a cumulus cloud with feet. He gave me a few bucks to buy milk – a bribe – to go shop for him so he wouldn’t end up fighting with a stock clerk again.

I went to the Good Super Wal-Mart on Highway 98 where all the new developments are going up. Another Super Wal-Mart was built since you last lived here and thus we have the Good Super Wal-Mart as opposed to the Bad Super Wal-Mart. Don’t ask me to describe the differences. All I know is the Bad Super Wal-Mart carries the Sam’s Choice peanut butter-filled pretzel bites and the Good Wal-Mart doesn’t. Yet the Good Wal-Mart has a plethora, by Hattiesburg’s standards, of soy food. So go figure.

I shopped for my dad and bought some milk and, on a whim, a Nice Price Elton John’s Greatest Hits album. I had been toying with the idea of buying it for some time but I didn’t know if I ought to. Would it lower my coolness ratio? Would I become one of these classic-rock dudes whose musical tastes stopped evolving after Three Dog Night broke up?

But, yes, I bought an Elton John record at Wal-Mart. It has “Candle in the Wind,” which might be the ultimate schmaltz crap suckdog song ever written – but it’s also got “Your Song,” and I will fight to the death anyone who disagrees with me that it’s one of the loveliest, sweetest pop songs ever made. I remember being in deadlocked traffic one afternoon in Dallas two years ago and hearing “Your Song” on the radio. I got chills. I had never listened to the lyrics before and I had never been at a place in my life where I had someone who I was glad was in the world. I was proud of myself for telling Sandi, when I got home, how much hearing that song made me think of her and I think she said “Awww…” and kissed me. It was one of those tiny moments in a marriage that no one gets when they’re not in that marriage.

Anyway, I put the E.J. CD into the car’s stereo as one of the “$5-ah-hour” guys rolled a train of shopping carts past me. And was glad that he did it quickly so that he couldn’t see me break down. I was in heaving, weeping sobs by the time the song was in its second verse. When it was over, I thought I had composed myself enough to drive. I left the parking lot, passing through the Home and Garden Center’s parade of wheelbarrows and fertilizers with wet, but not sopping eyes. It wasn’t until I was on the highway headed home that it hit me again – how much I miss her, how much it hurts to go on sometimes, how I’m happy I’m in Hattiesburg but I don’t love it, don’t need it, don’t love or need anything, really, except her. And she’s dead. Not divorced. Not living in Canada. Not remarried. Dead. I pulled off the highway into the nearby parking lot of a strip mall and sat there in the dark, spitting warm tears on the steering wheel. This fit, I thought, is taking care of that ache I had all day. This is what I needed – and I bought it at Wal-Mart.

Here in Hattiesburg, I am, I think, happier than I’ve ever been – sometimes. I like being here, renting a house my father paid $6,000 for, walking the dog when I want to, letting her crawl under the house to chase cats, working nights at the local newspaper, becoming someone that’s new in some places, old in others.

And I’m sadder than I’ve ever been, too, but since Sandi died I guess that goes without saying. I don’t revel in being sad, believe me, and people who do like being sad confuse me. I’m glad that I can cry my eyes out because it’s cathartic and cleansing even though I miss her terribly. I have to remind myself that I’m not the same person any more.

This particular day itself didn’t help either. Gray, overcast days in Mississippi seem interminable. You remember them. It’s not so much the sky as it is all the longleaf pines. They wall you off and with a low, gray sky, you feel like something’s trying to crush you.

And while I can get along in Hattiesburg and enjoy myself – especially compared to the dark months of last winter – I don’t think she would’ve been happy returning here. Because she was sick and wanted to see the world before she died. And life in Hattiesburg (or anywhere) when you can’t go someplace on your own, unassisted, is difficult.

I left my dad’s milk in his refrigerator, left his spare change by the door and locked the kitchen door while my parents slept upstairs.

It’s crossed my mind a few times how when Sandi broke up with Peter, the rich pillhead in Bloomington, Indiana, that she moved home and took her old job at Sears back and put her life back together much like I’m doing. Hattiesburg is a place to recuperate. It’s quiet. It’s slow.

I’ve felt, on more than one occasion, that I have Sandi’s window on the world now that I’m back here and missing someone the way she missed him. I’m missing her in different ways. A part of me sees myself as a sentry, standing watch over her grave and my memories and that I’m at peace with it. But another part thinks that it hasn’t completely sunk in how she isn’t coming back. Once the one-year anniversary of her death arrives, she won’t appear and ask if I missed her.

Somewhere, I hope, she isn’t miserable and complaining about the overcast sky or Wal-Mart. But I hate that she wasn’t healthier when I knew her. I hate that she isn’t here to cry to, instead of crying about.