Vicksburg

My thoughts have wondered off my ever important work-topic today-- how the writers of the UCC clearly missed the issue with which I am presented. I have been reading a book about the Battle of Vicksburg and the campaign in Mississippi during the Civil War. It's my ever present effort to dull my mind during the first hour of being on the trainer. I am ready for the sun to come up just a few minutes earlier and then I'm back outside because this is killing me.

I admit that I am in love with the City of Vicksburg. Unfortunately that city does not exist anymore. People back home ask if there was a place in Mississippi that I would be willing to live in for a long while and I always respond by saying either Oxford or Vicksburg. I realize now that neither is correct but for different reasons. The Oxford that I knew and loved is vanishing for me. The city remains, but the reasons I loved it are slowly disappearing as I grow older and my interests grow further away. I had the same feelings regarding Lawrence, KS too. I can never recapture the city that I lived in while going to school because the opportunities and motivations that drove me back then are changed and will continue to change.

As to Vicksburg, the city that I am in love with has not existed for a long time and maybe never has. I have an overly romanticized view of the town, which doesn't match reality. I picture it as parasols and southern belles walking down Washington St. In my mind the city is the epitome of the arts and culture. The high point of ante bellum life with balls, clubs and dinners. I even once thought of buying the historic Balfour House which was for sale recently ($895,000 for the house and the 1 acre lot next to it--that would have been a steal).

Upsettingly, reality does not mix with the present. What exists is a shadow of what could exist. There is so much potential in that town, but no one seems capable of unlocking it. The mayor has done an improving effort to push it forward, but still violence, drugs and murder are hard to push out of your city. I wish the government could come in, evict the population of most of downtown, bulldoze it and start afresh. Then it could become the city that I imagine it in my mind being. However, thinking now, that if I did buy the Balfour House surely any left over spirits of Confederate dead would haunt it's Illinois owner. It would be an interesting turn of fate for the home. Maybe it would be the completion of a long-lost goal of U.S. Grant. I still do have LullaBelle.