...You must first understand a place like Mississippi. William Faulkner said that. Or wrote it. I don't know which, but they're his words, and the first time I saw them, on a poster in our town's annual arts fair, I about jumped out of my shoes it seemed so apt. "I have to get that poster," I told my wife, thinking that $40 was not too much to spend for such a piece of wisdom. "We can print it out and tape it above your desk if you really want," she said, and this did seem much wiser. I never did print it out, but I figured I'd start a site to talk about this crazy place and our little family's time here.
My wife and I moved here from Atlanta, GA (as opposed to all the other Atlantas out there in the good ole U.S. of A.) almost three years ago, in September of 2009. We had been married for less than two months. I was hired to work in the family company, a planer mill and concentration yard, and I took the job because after five years of spotty, irregular employment, nailing down full time work somewhere where they didn't know I was a fairly smart and hard working guy seemed like a formidable task, at best. We had a plan. She'd go to law school at Ole Miss, I'd work at the plant, and in four years, we'd accelerate to ludicrous speed and get the hell out of this place. We felt like this was a good plan. God laughed, though not unkindly. We revise our plans as he hides giggles behind an omniscient grin.
Today, we find ourselves in Starkville, MS. I am still working at the family company. She is in school at Mississippi State University. We both struggle with living in this state, at times, but there are ways in which we know it has been good for us. Today my wife wore a cute hairband that she usually never would have before; friends would have said, "That's not you!" I wear cowboy boots now, at least when it's not summer.
And at work on Friday, I witnessed my first ever encounter with... we'll have to call them superpowers, I guess. I'm not sure how else to describe a one ton dumpster bouncing off the back of one of my employees and him being able to shake it off like a pesky horse fly, but that's what I saw. He didn't see me see this; at least I hope he didn't. And in light of this new information, I am holding off on firing Kostack for the time being.
