November 16th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
At some point in the mid 1980s, the Sunflower grocery store in Noxapater, MS started selling Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. My grandmother could hardly resist, and so I started receiving a few volumes each time she visited, or I brought a few home each time I went to stay with her. In retrospect, these were encyclopedias of the quality one would expect from the Sunflower. There were huge omissions, often discovered the night before some school project was due. And being the urbane sophisticate I was, I had already encountered the World Book Encyclopedia at school and was soon to encounter the Britannica once I began attending St. Andrew’s, the posh private school in Jackson where my great aunt’s bequeathed education trust fund eventually sent me. Between the encyclopedias and the annual almanacs that my grandmother kept in her living room turned library, I was awash in thousands of pages of knowledge tidbits. Dates, populations, world and state capitals, geography trivia, all of it was fascinating. I loved sitting down with these books and taking it all in. I’ve mentioned my father’s capacity for obsession with a single subject’s minutiae before. Really both of my parents shared that trait. I was probably the only kid in Brandon who grew up in a home with a complete copy of the Warren Commission Report (oh, the testimony! the photos!), the collected files of former MS Highway Patrol head T.B. Birdsong and prints of the autopsy photos of the 3 civil rights workers slain in Philadelphia in 1964 all within reach. Some kinds find their dad’s Playboy stash. I found my mom’s civil rights documents stash and used to sneak peaks at photos from the aftermath of the Ole Miss riots and the aforementioned autopsy photos (but fear not, I was a teenager.) All of this is to say that my home was rich with stuff to learn about and I couldn’t help but marinate in it.
The Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedias have gone by the wayside after many years of faithful service. But I’ve kept the included Hammond World Atlas. Many was the night as a child that I curled up in bed and flipped through it, marking the states I’d visited, the cities in those states and thinking of the places I’d most like to see again. I began tracking where I’d been in 1989, first by putting a checkmark next to the name of the state at the top of the page in the atlas, then circling the names of cities I remembered from my trip. It makes perfect sense, because in 1989 the 6th grade made a trip to Williamsburg, VA. We went up through Gatlinburg, TN, then over to Monticello/Charlottesville/UVa, then spent the night in Fredericksburg, then drove down to Williamsburg for several days, then across to Knoxville (where my roommates and I snuck a peek at Eddie Murphy’s Raw on HBO after lights out), then home again. In 1989, I had visited 15 states. By 1990, that figure had jumped to 21. After my 8th grade trip to England in 1991, I’d jumped to 23 states and 1 foreign country. By 1994, my junior year of high school, I’d visited 28 states and 5 foreign countries (England, France, Mexico, Costa Rica and a brief stopover for fuel in Nicaragua.) I added Belize in December 2002, and had visited 33 states. At last count, in 2003, I’d added Canada (7 countries) and 35 states. It’s hilarious to imagine the frantic return from a trip in middle or school and the rush to add to the tally, and I know I did it several times. Someday, maybe one of the boys will find it and laugh out loud.
My parents also subscribed me to the Time Life books series The Story of Flight. It was a deal where you could pay in installments and Time-Life Books would send you a collectible installment. I’ve kept my favorite one, Fighting Jets. It’s a wonderful book, filled with stories from fighter pilots from the Korean War and Vietnam, and these hand drawn color sketches of aircraft used by the American military and their various adversaries. Planes were supposed to be my trains, and my parents were both good about encouraging me. We’d stop at airports so that I could take pictures of airliners. We visited the Memphis Belle a number of times, went to the annual airshow at Hawkins Field and I got books. Again, I didn’t read these things cover to cover. I kind of marinated in them–finding something that was interesting to look at, and possibly reading what was written about it in the pages around the pictures. At one point I could have told you who the top two aces in Mig Alley during the Korean War were. To this day, the F-86 Sabre remains my second most favorite American military aircraft of all time (and how many kids or adults have a favorite American military aircraft? That’s surreal, isn’t it?) behind the P-51 Mustang, which is perhaps the most perfect military aircraft ever devised in all aspects of its being—fastest, sleekest, most euphonious. And I can’t believe the amount of time I spent just looking at pictures of these things, reading numbers (top speed 400+ mph, fastest non-jet aircraft in WW II) and committing this stuff to memory.
It’s almost enough to make a man want to banish the internet from his house, or to turn a man into an internet addict because of the rabbit holes that he can chase at will.
