E.B. White once told an interviewer, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
After a lot of hapless ruminating on the former lately, last week I erred heavily on the latter.
A pal picked me up in a rental car before dawn Saturday morning. Over the next four days we drove to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis (after a detour to Johnny Cash’s boyhood home in the middle of muddy clay fields outside Dyess, Arkansas) …

… were welcomed by a lavishly overstaffed crew at a quiet and lonely Graceland Mansion …

… at an off-Beale Street joint called Earnestine and Hazel’s, ate the best hamburgers either of us had ever tasted in our lives and then exchanged thoughts on marriage and other topics with bartender/philosopher Mr. Nate …

… in his snugandevil bar in a back room of an old brothel …

… contemplated the dead-flat forgottenness of Northern Mississippi on a hushed Sunday morning drive where Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie did most of the talking, pulled off on a gravel road for a soul food lunch of fried chicken and meatloaf (and collared greens and mashed potatoes and cornbread) …

… stopped at a juke joint for a long lesson from Jimmy, the musical descendant of a man who invented a way of playing blues guitar that will probably die when Jimmy does …


… took heart in the relative prosperity of Hattiesburg, where the hotel bartenders were attending University of Southern Mississippi and making bigger plans, then laid down our swimming heads before making the next day’s drive over Lake Pontchartrain on the 28-mile-long Causeway Bridge, meeting another pal over bloody Marys, walking in a second-line parade …

… devouring five-pound mounds of crawfish (each), finding ourselves (or was it just me?) flirting harmlessly but quite obviously with a happily married 78-year-old woman (last name Turnipseed), waking up the next morning in the 1813 mansion that housed our rooms and after urgent coffee and beignets at Cafe Du Monde, finding every whiskey bar, billiards bar and jazz bar we could visit and still walk back, around midnight, was it?
I recommend taking just such a trip yourself one of these days very soon. But I will warn you, boy: After a prison-break like that, the volume of the strange news you find yourself catching up on at the airport gate will hit you hard and you’ll need to hold onto your joy with both hands. But these days, I guess you need to learn how to do that anyway.