Another reflection

Though I don't know completely what to do with all of this knowledge and experience that I have been storing up for the best part of the last year, I do know that I am closer to Alabama than I was before, closer than most people I know. Rarely do we take the time to intentionally experience the things right in front of our faces, which I what I set out to do.

Last year, when I was showing a colleague the list of Surdna fellowship projects that were accepted along with mine, he looked at and said, "Dude, you're an idiot! These other people are going to Africa and Spain . . . and you volunteered to drive around the place you already live. For a year!" I saw his point -- he was joking and he wasn't, too. A lot of people I have talked to, both friends and people I met during this project, wondered why I was doing this. Sometimes, so did I.

These days, I have been listening to music a lot more lately. In the hubbub of raising kids and teaching, living the life of a responsible adult (cough, cough), one of the things I have sacrificed that I used to really enjoy is listening music. Music has always meant a lot to me. When I was younger and single, I used to spend hours listening to music. I used to put on an album or tape, and put on my headphones or sometimes just set the speakers on the either side of my head, and listen, for hours. I miss doing that, and I have missed it a lot lately, now that I find myself more and more often resorting to simple pleasures to relieve the stresses of daily life. I have started again making time to sit and listen to some of my favorite music.

Probably my favorite song of all time is The Byrds' version of "Wasn't Born to Follow," a tinny country-rock/folk song, with a Moog synthesizer break in the middle, whose last lines are:

. . . she may beg,

she may plead,

she may argue with her logic,

and mention all the things I lose,

that really have no value,

in the end she will surely know

I wasn't born to follow.

I have always liked that song, because it suits me -- the song, laid back and without anger or discontent or malice, says: I don't intend to live the way you think I should, because I am going to live the way I want to. And that side of me comes out in projects like this one . . . A lot of people seem to have wondered why I was traveling around Alabama, talking to people and seeing things, driving back roads and just looking around. Because I wanted to, that's why. If someone else doesn't want to do what I did, then don't. I say that without anger or malice. I did this for the same reason that I wrote books about Clark Walker and John Beecher. Because I wanted to and I believe in what I was doing. For the same reason that I have continued working on the book of Southern memoirs (that is now under contract with McFarland) even after the scholarly reviewers for The University of Virginia Press and the University Press of Mississippi totally bashed both my work and me. Because I want to and I believe in what I am doing. And that same part of me will cause me to write (and finish) this book about Alabama that I am working on now, the follow-up to all this traveling around. And all the people in Kingdom Come may wonder why I bother, or tell me about how I don't do things the way other people do, and the manuscript may get a few rejections letters, including some nasty ones. But I believe in what I am doing, so I intend to continue doing it.