In the offbeat film Leaving Normal, two women head West to make new lives for themselves. Their reasons for packing up their possessions and striking out for parts unknown are varied and depressing, including romantic histories that would make my mother blush. Having nothing to lose, they decide to get the heck out of Dodge, or, in this case, Normal, Oklahoma. Or in my case, Jackson.

Our reasons for leaving are dissimilar, but our wanderlust and curiosity are identical. Since graduating from Millsaps in 1983 and Ole Miss in 1986, I have come and gone several times from the familiarity that is Jackson: twice just long enough to hug a few friends and reload the moving van, and once to work for a year.

As I was preparing to leave Jackson the last time, some twelve years ago, I ran into a woman I’d known since we were both in knee socks and colorful barrettes. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, her voice tinged with exasperation. “I thought you were happy here.” I was happy there. I was also happy in Knoxville and Washington. If a frustrated search for happiness were the motivation for moving, I would be worse off than my friend’s tone implied. Moving shouldn’t be about avoiding a situation or erasing a memory. When you pack your belongings, taping the boxes and labeling them ever so carefully, you better be sure the one marked “personal satisfaction” is stacked alongside your grandmother’s deviled egg plate and the petrified corsage from your first prom.

Moving to another city does not mean you are at loose ends. It can mean enjoying the challenge of a new locale, choosing a career that demands relocation, making friends from other parts of the country, thriving on change. Plenty of people who never venture farther than the Delta are less grounded than I am. I’ve just had more addresses.

Transferring to Millsaps College after my freshman year at Ole Miss was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. Like many of my peers, I hadn’t considered going to college in the same town where I’d lived for eighteen years. So at a certain point in my life, staying in Jackson was the thing to do, the thing that saved me.

Even today, after building a fruitful life for myself in Nashville, occasionally I’m overcome with homesickness, almost immobilized by the need to meet old friends at Nick’s, hear Barry Hannah read at Lemuria, and order a gyro at Keifer’s. And so I come home again. For as much as Jackson has grown in recent years, I can still find myself there, in the hallways of my high school and the church of my father’s funeral, in the faces of old friends and the antics of their children.

Near the end of Leaving Normal, the main character says to her cohort, in distress, “How long am I supposed to keep going?”

“Till you get there, I guess,” comes the response.

“Get where?” Which is, for those of us who care to admit it, the question that really matters.

At times I may not know where I’m going, but I do know where I got my start. And for that, I am grateful.

 

 Published in the Northside Sun Magazine. Copyright 2006, Amy Lyles Wilson.

Tags: Hometown, humor