Roll on Mississippi

Home and Pain. I learned from my friend Wright Thompson that is the meaning of Nostalgia. For me Nostalgia is the theme of 2020.

Home and Pain. It is cold and rainy outside today and although it is already the middle of December it is the first time I feel like winter is here. We are only days away from the shortest day of the year. I feel the change today. I feel it to my bones. Covid has changed home forever. People died. We stayed mostly hidden, behind those awful but necessary blue masks, or behind the door of our home. I am honestly not sure that home will ever be the same.

I just learned that Charlie Pride died and I am bummed. I got out my old Alvarez Guitar that I glued together days before playing at the Bologna Performing Arts Center just a month or so before 9-11. It was a contest. I won. Happy days before dark ones. 9-11 happened. It was the last time I remember a national life changing event. We were mad and patriotic and waved our flags with pride. George Bush stood on the rubble and we all loved the president right there in that moment. In that despair we found that we were all the same.

This is not the same thing. There are no flags waving. There are no unifying speeches. There is silence and now even the music stops. So, I get that guitar and start to play, “walking along, whistling a song, barefoot and fancy free…..”

These are the words of my childhood. Literally the theme song of my youth. I sing it and I am immediately that little cotton topped boy living out on the farm playing in the Delta dirt until the sun goes down and God paints that daily picture.

The sunsets this year in the Delta have been amazing. Scientist say that sands that blew all the way from the Sahara and are suspended in the Delta sky reflect light and allow us to see the orange and yellow and purple. For me that has been the one of the things that remind me of tomorrow. Tomorrow will come and we have the promise of more sunsets.

We have lost so very much this year. We have lost freedoms, safety, jobs, businesses, and loved ones. It freaking sucks. I do not like it. Pain and home. Damn.

But.

As bad as 2020 is I think we will all look back with that nostalgia. I won’t forget watching Stranger Things on Netflix with my daughters when we first had the lockdown and all the family time we had.  I won’t forget all the homemade cookies my daughter made this year. I won’t forget traveling the state alone in my truck testing out gas station food alone and all the friends I have made from it.

The sun will rise tomorrow and we will find ways to cope. That is what makes us special. Our ability to take pain and make it into something else. We get creative and smarter. We learn and grow. We find humor in the despair. We’ve lost some innocence this year and we may never be what we were but we can always be something else. Something better.

Charlie Pride maybe more than anyone from Mississippi reminded us that we really are all the same. He broke down barriers with fineness and love and music and that is the most Mississippi thing I have ever heard. Maybe that is the real lesson for 2020. We are the same.

“cool river breeze, like peppermint leaves, the taste of it takes be back. Chewing on a straw, torn overalls, cane polls and old straw hats”

Roll on Charlie Pride. You will be missed and we will be ok.

Stafford Shurden is an entrepreneur, writer, social media influencer, and former Judge. Stafford resides in Drew, Mississippi with is family. Contact Stafford through email at staffordshurden@gmail.com