Everything was going well until that point. All of us at the table were trying to find solutions to some long-held civic problems. Then the bomb came.

“Mobile has always been known as being a very cultured city, excepting the post-War period…”

There it was, the meme that popped up like dandelion blooms once you got east of the malls. It’s part of a big division here, every bit as relevant as the color line. Its kernel is this: Mobile was a cultural paradise until the hillbillies flooded in after the War.

I wanted to ask, “You mean the post-War period when Mobile’s opera was first established? When the museum of art was first built? When most of its public works first took off? When its symphony was finally re-established after the Depression wiped it out? When the library system finally expanded beyond downtown?” I wanted to interject, but held my tongue because it wasn’t the time or place for that debate.

I’ve heard this for years now and have always shaken my head. I always wondered how and why this could be the case. Was Mobile once drastically different than it is now? Was it overflowing with refinement and high culture from end to end, a true artistic Shangri-La in humid isolation until the rabid hordes swept in to look for jobs in the shipyards and at Brookley?

Was the Creole past eradicated? Mardi Gras is still the focal point of life here. The Catholic Church is still mighty powerful. The architecture would seem to say it’s not. It’s easy enough to find that. It’s also easy to see how truly small Mobile was in the days before World War II.

So what was different? And if Mobile was once so culturally rich, how did it defy the odds and how could we get it back?

Logically, I looked at Mobile’s history. The French put the capital of Louisiana here but knew it wasn’t permanent. They were actively looking for the mouth of the Mississippi River and after 15 years or so, they moved the seat of power to New Orleans.

Mobile languished for a century as a frontier town, a trading post where native people and explorers convened. The interior of the South was wilderness. So it wasn’t a refined cultural nexus then.

New Orleans boomed and became known as the Paris of the New World for good reason. It was at the mouth of the most important transportation system in the hemisphere. Mobile was at the mouth of a smaller river that only led into the still untamed inner-South.

The British assumed control for 17 years, then the Spanish for the next three decades. By the time the American flag was raised, the War of 1812 was over. The new owners set about eradicating the original people from the South’s interior to portion out the lands.

Then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and the South was revolutionized. Suddenly, the rivers north of Mobile weren’t just a gateway to wilderness, they were a conveyor to some of the most lucrative resources in the world.

As a testimony to how quickly Mobile’s fortunes ascended under the early 19th century Cotton Boom, the population in 1813 was 300 and by 1822 it was 2,800.

Despite its relatively small population as compared to the cities on the east coast, Mobile was the fourth busiest port in the nation in the years before the Civil War. Cotton made up 99 percent of the value of exports, with lumber being most of the remaining single percentage point. Only New Orleans exported more.

So there was the big move. Maybe it was then that Mobile became the cultural cornucopia some tell me it was. Well, yes and no.

Because of the ebb and flow of the cotton trade, the city’s population – about 30,000 on the eve of the Civil War –  and activity followed a seasonal pattern. In the summer, before crops were harvested, the city’s port sat mostly dead. Summers were also a time of plague and swelter. The wealthier folks who lived in town retreated to Springhill.

Once the cotton crop was in and the town was flush with money in late fall, wealthy planters and their families from upstream came to Mobile for the winter and the folks in Springhill returned. Social season began and continued until the heat rose again in spring and the duties of the plantations called the seasonal residents back to the hinterlands.

But during the winter, when the mosquitoes were at bay and cash was everywhere, Mobile was certainly filled with cultural pursuits, right?

Well that depended on with whom you spoke. To those on top, yes. To those multitudes whose cheap labor manned the wagons and docks and whose numbers normally equal or exceed the ones further up the ladder, it certainly was no hidden gem. But those folks don’t write history books.

In those years, entrepreneurs came in who had no connection to the old Creole families and assembled their empires. Mardi Gras as we know started to become a reality then, far more elaborate than the version observed in the century previous.

Tales abound of Madame Octavia Walton Le Vert and the notable salon society she indulged but we need to remember, she was a socialite. She wasn’t the wife of a longshoreman, she was from the peak of the upper-crust. Her lifestyle wasn’t available to everyone. And even Le Vert’s later crusade calling to mind the deplorable living conditions of working class women would seem to indicate there was plenty of less-than-peachy living in Mobile then.

When the Civil War began, Mobile’s fortunes plummeted. The city went into a depression that lasted decades.

Finally, toward the close of the 19th century, the locals begged the federal government to dredge out a ship channel that increased shipping traffic.

While Mobile had a considerable population as compared to its colonial days — 40,000 in 1900; 60,000 in 1920 – its overall status slipped. It was the South’s eighth largest city in 1880 but was the 15th largest in 1910.

As mentioned, a local symphony had been assembled until the Great Depression ended it. There were also occasional public concerts in Bienville Square that were sponsored by groups like the Kiwanis but they featured fare like Sousa and locally penned popular tunes, not the European classical canon.

There was vaudeville at places like the Saenger and the Lyric theaters and plenty of movie houses, but that’s not exactly high-brow. There might have been occasional chamber concerts or impromptu plays, but I doubt spontaneous Shakespeare was common up on Davis Avenue or in Crichton.

So then where does this myth originate? There are some likely spots. If human psychology is any indication, it could be the result of Mobile’s fall from prominence when the capital moved to New Orleans and later, when the Cotton Boom ended.

It’s like the mind of a better-than-average adolescent athlete. He was okay in his heyday but after the bright lights fade and muscles wane, the tricks of nostalgia inflate his deeds of yesteryear. Decades go by and he’s telling himself and other unfortunate souls how great he was, that he missed his chance at the big time by some stroke of poor luck.

An esteemed local historian once told me that Mobilians did a grand job of reinventing their history and the city’s cultural renown during the post-War period, that the vision of the Azalea City as a sullied beauty emerged then. It could have been a reaction to friction from the influx of new residents.

This is a story we often see in other parts of American history, just writ larger. Immigrants come to our shores, they struggle with acceptance, then assimilate. Once a part of the mainstream, they seek to close the door behind them.

That same course is abundant here. New blood comes in, gets things moving, then becomes a part of the establishment. Look at the resurgence in downtown Mobile. The great majority of it was accomplished by those outside the traditional power structure. That’s where your pluck and fortitude is found, not in the comfort of cushy parlors but in the hunger of unproven souls.

Perpetuating the myth that Mobile was somehow more perfect, more refined before the latest injections of civic DNA does nothing but create divisions. Newer residents – as if settling here 50 years ago makes you “new” – might not be exactly like you but that doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to offer.

And if those residents’ predilections aren’t taken into account when addressing issues of how to remove downtown’s stigma and make it thrive, if you marginalize them before it’s even started, then what’s the point with trying to proceed?

All populations divide into subsets of like-minded folks. It’s human nature. But our population base isn’t large enough to allow that to continue unaddressed and still accomplish what we need to do with downtown.

Downtown Mobile needs to be the city’s living room, where we all feel our needs met and aren’t dissuaded by our slight differences. Without that, we’ve hit a ceiling on community well being.

Mobile has an intriguing and deep history that few towns can boast. Why deny it with hyperbole? Accept what we are and work with that. Use your strengths and improve your weaknesses.

When you love something or someone, you do so for what they are, not what you wish they were.

It is a melancholy thing to go through the daily routine of life in Mobile and encounter the pitiful artifacts of our shambling and failing public school system. To hear the coarse vulgarities, the overwrought moods and tempers that fly into rage at the slightest provocation and reveal suspicious breeding and wan acculturation is distressing. And that’s just from the system’s critics.

The angst caused to detractors by these schools is burdensome, the tales they relay alarming. Students lash out in violence at teachers, who in turn must live in fear rather than protect themselves. Little care is given for the actual education of the young charges but only toward attaining minimum levels on tests that protect teachers’ jobs. School books are written so that students are captivated by subjects that might appeal to their superficial interests, tricking and luring them into further discovering the recesses of history and science.

Most agonizing is the focus this begs from the schools’ proliferate critics, good citizens who must waste the precious minutes of their lives with relentless chiseling at the crumbling public educational foundation. Without their harangue, who would stand to scream its flaws? Who would gnash their teeth before turning to pour glowing adoration on the parochial and private counterparts to these public halls of shame? We shame ourselves to force this weight upon them.

No longer is it good enough to point to the anomalous as a model. We can’t rely upon the testimony of parents who say their children’s public school education is perfectly fine because they claim they get from it what you put into it.

They claim they enjoy the mixture of socio-economic backgrounds their kids are exposed to. It brings shudders to think of the confusion variety causes to young minds, to be forced to see how the progeny of a plumber can be treated the same as an accountant’s children and can excel despite the filth-laden funds that put clothes on their backs. The mental chaos caused by realization that the offspring of a union between a mechanic and a lawyer can produce scholastic excellence is too much for youngsters to process.

Where is the order? Where is the deference to tradition and lineage and zip code? How will they learn to stay in their place and keep to their own kind?

We must forget about pinnacles of overachievement like George C. Hall Elementary School in the deepest and darkest (wink, wink) recesses of Mobile’s inner-city. Not too very long ago, it was one of the worst schools in one of the worst systems in the nation. Now, because they found a principal who was dedicated to hiring good teachers, to instilling discipline, to establishing the relationships with the kids and parents that fostered learning, they have become a national model for success on a shoestring budget.

Should we expect that everywhere, just because they’ve shown it’s possible? I’m not sure. How would such thinking further the entrepreneurial efforts of those who put food on the table by selling white buttoned-down shirts and plaid skirts? How is a child supposed to learn the correct yearning for unquenchable material pursuits when they see that modest income is no barrier to intellectual achievement?

Well, no more. Time has come for an honest solution to their woes. We need to have the fortitude and strength to embrace our cultural character in its barest form.

We must rid ourselves of the Mobile County public schools once and for all. Abolish it all.

If we look inside our collective cultural heart, we know it’s the only solution. The system is Balkanizing anyway, with various municipalities splintering off from the whole. This will only hasten the inevitable.

And the inner-city schools that aren’t destined to break away? Well, do we really care about those? Besides, if ignorance is bliss, won’t educating so many who are destined for so little simply add to their frustrations? Is that fair for us to saddle them with that kind of awareness?

We should finally embrace the idea buried in our civic DNA that those who deserve education are born to parents who will find a way to school them. Let’s just drop the pretension that we want to solve the problem more than end the embarrassing explanations to nosy outsiders.

What about those children who aren’t born into caring homes? Maybe our town’s noted genuflection before the altar of commerce can provide the answer. Let local businesses buy the schools, start their own little classroom where they can bring the tykes up with the most remedial of education, just the knowledge they will need to work in a steel plant or on the docks.

Kids don’t need to know the half-life of radium, just that it makes your pee look funny when you swallow it.

When they’re not in the classroom, the youngsters can go to work. The marriage of capitalism and education could produce far more diligent and fanatical consumers, anyway.

Maybe we can even tattoo the name of the parent corporation onto the children’s bodies so we know who bought and paid for their little futures. That way any truants can be returned to their rightful overseers.

It will be good for them and good for us. We’ll lower the tax base, they’ll learn a work ethic. We have notorious infrastructure issues here; well problem solved. The younger kids are a good size to shimmy through sewer pipes and storm drains, even into the nooks and crannies of ships. Tiny fingers work faster and children have far more energy than adults.

Plus, it’s easier to hoist an eight-year-old on a drop line when he’s dangling over the side of freighter with a sandblaster.

Besides, how are we ever supposed to catch up to the new global economy when we’re worried about things like minimum wage and safety standards? It’s not enough to lure foreign investors here with promises of lowered payrolls and tax waivers. We have to give them the Third World in a first-rate manner.

And those who don’t want their children exposed to those scary Latino kids won’t have to worry this way. Besides, the little muchachos need to be in the fields or on the factory floors anyway, right?

Now, I know the outrage building in you at this suggestion, the rightful furor at the eradication of something so dear that life without it seems altogether impossible.

Well, don’t worry. We can preserve what’s ultimately of the greatest importance. Football will endure. The local private schools can offer scholarships to all the best players anyway.

And the rest? Let them eat King cake.

Basking in the low-slung winter sun, I watched the evisceration proceed under a feckless sky. In they went, out they came with vital components tucked bit by bit into their assigned spots, to be scattered here and there.

The Krispy Kreme was being dismantled. Men trundled clattering equipment across a ramp and into a waiting truck, no doubt bound for other facilities or maybe storage.

“They might as well be putting my heart on those dollies,” a voice sniffled from behind me.

I turned to find Straight Up Princess behind me, a tear tracing her cheek from behind her oversized sunglasses.

“Yeah, it’s a shame,” I said. “Time moves on and leaves us watching its wake subside. After a while, it’s just feeble ripples on the shore.”

“I can’t believe the city let this happen,” Princess said, tucking a wind tossed and highlighted blonde lock behind her ear. “This is all their fault.”

I cocked my head. “I thought you were a small government type, Princess,” I said. “Why would you want the city to intervene in business affairs?”

“It’s their damn fault the business is moving,” Princess said, clacking a wooden heel on the sidewalk for punctuation. “They got in Krispy Kreme’s way and forced ‘em to move. All they wanted was to improve their business. This is a Mobile landmark after all!”

I rolled my eyes and prepared for what I had heard since the closing of the doughnut shop was revealed weeks before. The web had been awash in outrage and mourning, with blame being passed around like herpes at a Kardashian family reunion.

“What? Because the city wouldn’t green light the owner’s plans for a drive-through window?” I said. “What he submitted fell short on several accommodations.”

“Oh bull, they just wanted kickbacks,” Princess said. “You know how corrupt it’s become downtown since Jones took over. It wasn’t going to cause no traffic problems.”

“Think again, Princess. I used to live right there,” I said, pointing to a house a block behind the now boarded-up shop. “The one thing I learned, other than self-control when the wind was blowing from this direction, was that it didn’t take much to screw up the traffic here. Because the lights for Bradford, Michigan and Ann are all on top of each other, it gets snarled up easily. I’ve sat at this light for 10 minutes or more, just waiting to turn left. It’s terrible in rush hour and I can’t imagine how the drive-through would affect it.”

Princess crossed her arms and shot me a look I’m sure she used when her salad fork didn’t match the rest of her place setting. Her foot started tapping.

“You ever been down here when we get one of our customary thunderstorms?” I asked as she arched one eyebrow. “When these humid skies open up and dump as little as an inch of rain in a half-hour, this intersection gets a foot deep in water, halfway down the block. You’d need a jet ski to pull up to the window and get a dozen glazed.”

“So, that’s the business owner’s problem,” Princess said. “If he wants to run that risk he should without the city telling him no.”

“Oh come on, Princess, you know as well as I do that businesses submit plans to the city all the time and are asked to change them,” I said. “My wife works at an architecture firm and I’ve heard all of it. The city said the owner was free to resubmit with a new approach and he chose not to.”

“Well, he didn’t want to expose his customers to unnecessary risk,” Princess said. “They wanted him to make people park around back and walk to the front door. They can’t do that in this neighborhood.”

“And when you consider how the lot was apportioned, that the back was used as a secured lot for the delivery trucks, that further complicates it,” I said. “Sounds to me like the business wasn’t working for this location anymore.”

Princess tapped a cigarette out of its pack and clicked her lighter. “But it was here for so long,” she said.

“Well, America’s a different place than it was in 1972,” I said. “Even in Mobile. People don’t want to leave their cars anymore. The owner said the west Mobile Krispy Kreme gets 60 percent of its retail sales from drive-through business. Of course with regional obesity rates, where even Paula Deen, the Southern saint of cholesterol, comes down with Type-2 diabetes, perhaps the fates are telling us something.”

Princess cocked her head.

“Maybe if you aren’t willing to leave your car to get a doughnut, you might not need one,” I said.

I savored a chilly breeze, turned my face toward it and squinted. “When’s the last time you ate here?” I asked.

“Well, not for a while,” Princess said. “I have to worry about getting into a Mardi Gras gown.”

“You could try giving up beer,” I said, half-smiling.

“Yeah? I could stop breathing too,” she shot back, rolling her eyes. “That’d make it fit better.”

“Well there you go,” I chuckled. “The owner admitted this place was just squeezing by and he was keeping it going out of sentimentality. End of story. Times change. Adaptation is key.”

Church bells near us rang the hour as I looked upward to catch a hawk wheeling against the azure sky.

“One thing that puzzles me about the drive-through window,” I said. “Doesn’t the appeal of a vintage building lie in going inside?”

“So I guess another relic of Mobile’s past goes to pot,” Princess said.

“Nah, somebody will use it,” I said. “The owner said he’s fielding offers already. It would make a great eatery. My wife said she wanted to see something along the lines of Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland but call it Doug H. Nuts.”

Princess chuckled.

“I’d like to see it as an old school, vintage diner,” I said. “Mid-century furnishings, aesthetic, the whole nine yards. The waitresses could wear old diner uniforms, play nothing but jazz, blues and standards like the old Freeman House. Camellia Grill meets Mickey Spillane, a deep-fried version of Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks.’ Maybe find a 1952 Ford to park by the front door. Call it Krazy Kat’s or Ko-Ko’s. as an homage to the old joint.”

“But what about the history?” Princess asked. “They’ve destroyed it.”

“Oh, c’mon,” I said, “in this town, something built in 1972 is practically brand new. People here don’t seem to care about architecture unless it’s at least 80 years old. I’ve heard too much disdain for mid-20th century buildings to think otherwise.”

The metal ramp bucked and rattled as the workers rolled a silver piece of equipment across it, then strapped it to the wall of the truck’s interior.

“Think about it,” I said, “no one batted an eye when they closed identical Krispy Kreme buildings at Airport and Azalea or at Highway 90 and Azalea. But they do with this one. Why? Is it because the people in this part of town have different sensibilities?”

Princess scanned the surroundings. “Haven’t you noticed the kinds of businesses that are locating to Government?” she said. “Payday loans, EZ rental, Medicaid offices, pawn shops. Even the bank near here closed.”

“Oh blow it out your azalea, Princess,” I said. “Midtown’s most upscale grocery store is just down the street, right near the Starbucks. There’s a church next to the now defunct doughnut shop. Another katty-corner from here. There’s a pair of drugstores, three gas stations, a veterinarian, a lawyer’s office…wait, hold on. You’re right. I know some folks who would tell you the last one on that list is indeed a bad element.”

Princess narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “You know Daddy’s a lawyer,” she said in mock anger and pointed with her cigarette.

“Then I don’t have to say it twice ,” I answered. “You know what kind of folks walk into an attorney’s office.”

“Yeah, the kind that couldn’t practice medicine,” Princess cackled.

Well, I guess it’s official. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a full part of the American mainstream. He’s no longer marginalized or seen as a threat he was during his life.

I know the slain civil rights leader is part of the status quo now because I’ve seen an ad for a sale connected with his holiday. Solemn ceremonies don’t mean squat. It’s when they use your memory to lure customers that counts here. So you made freedom ring? Unless cash registers follow suit, you’re not a full-fledged American hero.

It’s in our national DNA. After all, international social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville noted it as early as 1835. “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men,” he wrote in Democracy in America. Of course, he also warned that democracy without a strong ethical base was doomed, but we don’t need to read the fine print.

C’mon, does anyone really know when Presidents’ Day is close other than the red-white-and-blue circulars luring shoppers into hardware stores and garden centers? “Honest Abe walked a mile in the snow to give a man a penny but you’ll save more than pennies when you come to Toilets-R-Us.” Boy, there’s some dignity for the Ol’ Railsplitter, huh?

We say we value freedom and self-determination but it’s consumption that seems to rule the nation. It’s what leaders warned us not to forsake before the dust had even settled on the men digging out the World Trade Center a decade ago. Seek revenge on the evil-doers. Go shopping.

“Hey, Bob! Did you see this new Makita drill I picked up?”

“Is that the one with the new auto-clutch?”

“You bet. Nothing says ‘freedom’ like 450 pounds of torque.”

“That’ll show Osama!”

So, Dr. King, you have arrived. When I can hear that Dr. Scholl’s sole inserts will make me feel like I’m walking on clouds while I’m marching to Selma, we know you’re a part of the American cultural firmament.

I can hear the barking pitchmen now: “Martin Luther King had a dream. Now you’ll have sweet dreams too on one of our Slumber-E-Z mattresses.”

Though in this area of the country, I’m surprised every bakeshop in sight isn’t advertising Martin Luther Kingcakes, complete with plastic figurines buried inside, each with their own tradition.

“Mama, how come Charlotte gets to sit at the head of the table?”

“Well, Scott, you know since her piece of cake had Rosa Parks, she gets to pick her own seat.”

But then again, I’m still surprised any of Mobile’s MLK parades haven’t involved throws considering everything short of a funeral procession feels the necessity to fling trinkets and snacks. I’m sure the folks in Chattanooga could whip up some combo vanilla-chocolate moonpies for a day dedicated to racial harmony.

Considering the waning bounds of taste in contemporary society, my only surprise is that we haven’t seen sales on billy clubs and firehoses. I’m sure they could find a Kardashian to pose in the ads. Seems like there’s nothing those folks won’t do for attention.

A little much, you say? I don’t think so. After all, look what we’ve done with Christmas.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Dr. King’s legacy shaped to fit someone’s petty desires. It’s what we do with everyone worth remembering.

Although I have to say, the recent movement to turn the MLK holiday into something that reflects the nature of service, of dedicating your life to higher goals, is refreshing. I just wonder how a society that can be as narcissistic and materialistic as ours will embrace such.

That’s the course I wanted to see us take in the wake of 9-11, to prove to our enemies and detractors that we could rise above the images of wanton consumption they associate with our culture. Sadly, we did nothing of the sort.

Who better to associate such altruism with than a man who spent the final decade of his life in logical mortal fear that every day would be his last? To willingly make yourself a target, to engender and welcome the scorn of a segment of our society whose very existence hinged on hatred and violence is something most of us can’t begin to understand. That kind of bravery deserves notice.

King knew from the day he stepped out onto the plank of public resistance that it would end over the turbulent waters of violent death. But he walked anyway.

It hasn’t been for nothing. While it can often seem that old ways and mindsets hang on too stubbornly, progress has been made. Sure, we still have a lot of the same divisions. Sunday morning remains the most segregated time in America.

While neighborhoods can still seem generally segregated, they aren’t to the extreme they were when King was alive. Economics are as much a predicator now as ethnicity.

Romantic relationships between individuals of varied races don’t cause the outrageous consternation they did even when the King holiday was established in the 1980s. People I know who fled Mobile to shelter their “mixed-race” children from certain attitudes have been surprised by how much tensions have eased with time.

Maybe one day everyone will learn what anthropologists can tell us, that race is a social construct and something nearly negligible in the realm of genetics. Ethnicity is something shaped by behavior far more than it’s embedded in a double helix.

We have the benefit of seeing a lot of ground behind us, but this isn’t the time for self-congratulation. That hard road trod serves best as inspiration that the many miles remaining are possible to conquer.

It’s an annual trap. The year ends and suddenly everyone’s traipsing back and forth across Einstein’s fourth dimension of time. We look back and take stock. We look ahead and promise.

Then our steps get sluggish. In an effort to change, to carry through on those resolutions, we often travel further back in search of behavioral roots. The musing can span decades, landing at random intervals along life’s trail.

“Well, see there I’ve always done this. Maybe if I…”

Pain and pleasure resurface from memory’s mist. Errors both tiny and significant balloon in retrospect.

For me, the new calendar is quickly followed by a birthday, a new chapter in the personal almanac, so these reflections come naturally. The holidays precede it, time with family and friends that also stir rumination on where we come from, what we’ve done.

Every human who’s ever lived has played that game. “If I had it to do all over again…”

Shortly, before New Year’s an ear worm burrowed into my mind. You know, a snippet of song that plants itself in your conscientiousness and refuses to leave you. Mine was old, something I haven’t heard in years that burst from its subconscious cocoon and has been flapping through my head for well over a week now.

You can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets, oh

Or you can come to terms and realize, you’re the only one who can’t forgive yourself, oh

It makes much more sense,

To live in the present tense.

Its relevance and logic are self-evident. Easy to say, hard to live by.

My life is littered with decisions that in hindsight could have been handled better. Harsh words cast I wish I could reel back in. Rash actions flung I would rather retrieve. Reluctance, hesitation, or just out-and-out stupidity are dog-eared corners marring the manuscript of my life.

“If I had it to do all over again, I’d change…”

Nothing. Not one bit.

To begin with, there’s an inherent paradox to such. Every decision in our lives sets off a cascade of resulting decisions. It’s called the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory, meaning a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon moves currents that churn others and so on down the line so that it affects global weather in the larger scale. We know it in smaller scale as a domino theory.

There’s no way to know whether something as innocuous as leaving your house a minute or so later on a given day could have irrevocably altered everything after that. Would you have been in a wreck or seen something that changed your perspective down the line? Who knows?

Of course, if some theoretical physicists are right, every decision possible and the resulting realities has occurred in an alternate universe anyway. Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive. Those paths were taken, somewhere, someway.

But if any of us suddenly stepped back and made those changes, we most likely wouldn’t have arrived at this point, reached this perspective that convinced us something might have been better if altered.

In the late ‘80s, an old friend from Birmingham contacted me and told me had gained an inroad with a reputable delivery service. His friend was in a position to award jobs and desperately needed drivers on the West Coast. My old buddy, one of my best friends in high school, said if I was game he could score employment for me in the San Francisco Bay area.

I thought about it. I had never been further west than Texas at that time, though I had an aunt in California who loved it. Other family members had journeyed there and brought back glowing reports. The job would be a good one. The company had a great track record, good benefits and a lengthy waiting list for openings.

Eventually, I turned him down. Don’t remember why exactly, I just know I did.

Months later, I stood behind a bar in west Mobile and watched on the TV as the World Series was interrupted by rumbling and a shaken broadcast crew began to talk of an earthquake. Only when coverage began to move out from the stadium did we all get a sense of how terrible it had been.

I remember looking at a chunk of roadway missing from a bridge over the bay, hearing of vehicles that plunged over its edge. Then came the shots of a collapsed multi-level freeway in Oakland, rows of cars and trucks that had been in typically heavy traffic and were sandwiched, flattened by falling slabs of concrete.

Would I have been in that traffic, out on delivery had I taken that job? The tremors occurred at the apex of afternoon traffic flow. It killed 63 people, left thousands homeless. I could have been one of them had I taken what seemed to be a great opportunity.

We could all say the same. Every little thing we’ve done, all the good and most of all the bad, make us who we are. My experiences might not seem the best to another. I might not have danced beside the Seine or climbed Kilimanjaro but what I’ve done is mine and mine alone. I might not have children or even much material wealth but what I do have is the essence of who I am. I don’t want that to change.

Sure, I want to refine myself. Granted, I realize time and experience will shape me in ways unseen right now. So what? I’m still grateful for what I have, the times in which I live, the people I’ve known and loved.

A recent Christmas gift contained a passage on Kurt Vonnegut and his realization on the meaning of life. “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” He was living in the present tense.

New Year’s resolutions? I have them but they don’t have anything to do with the calendar. Be open to new experiences. Realize adventures can come in small and sublime doses.

But the utmost contains all of that. It’s what should govern every moment. It’s something we’re born knowing but then the world we’ve made tries to make us forget.

Cherish life and help others do the same. It’s all that matters.

Happy New Year!

I needed some holiday respite. The usual whirlwind was tumultuous, all the Christmas soirees for offices, social groups, community organizations, family get-togethers both in town and out could turn the “ho ho ho” into a “huh?” as it all went swirling past.

My clandestine watering hole was thankfully quiet. A little Miles, a little Jack on the rocks and a lot of calm makes a nice little pick-me-up.

Hoarse laughter from the corner of the bar turned my head. An old man’s Zippo clicked shut as the baby beside him pulled on a cigar and coughed out a pungent cloud. Shocked, I watched the elder drizzle brown liquor on the formica bartop as he clumsily poured a glass of spirits into the baby’s bottle.

“Hey, man, what are doing to that kid?” I said and took steps toward them. The old guy kept pouring.

“Hey, pal, mind your business,” a gravelly voice answered.

The geezer’s elbow jutted into the baby’s shoulder. “Eh, he don’t mean nothin’,” the octogenarian rasped as he patted around for the bottle’s rubber nipple. I realized then the froggy vocals were coming from the tyke, not Gramps.

“Look, you don’t need to be corrupting this kid with these kind of habits,” I said.

The old guy peered up from under hoary eyebrows that made his forehead look like a polar bear refuge. “It ain’t all my idea, mac,” he wheezed.

“Yeah, I’m the one who brought the Cubanos,” the baby croaked. “Pops wanted to down rum but I insisted on Scotch.”

“Don’t you know that stuff is terrible for someone your age?” I asked the babe as he tugged on the bottle to squelch his cough.

“Why would I care?” the kid said. “I don’t have long anyway.” He wiped his chin with a dirty sash, its glittery “2012” marred and crumbling away. “Besides, what’s it going do, stunt my growth? I should be so lucky.”

“He’s going need all this in the next 12 months,” the geezer said. “I wish my predecessor a year ago had been thinking about me like this.”

I cocked my head. “What was so bad about your reign?” I asked.

“Look around this place,” the old man said. “Look at what we lived with for the last year. The crime rate’s climbing. City revenue’s falling. The city parks look like garbage dumps. City population’s dropping. What’s there to look forward to?”

“Well, it wasn’t all bad,” I said. “We didn’t get any hurricanes.”

“No, but we got a hurricane simulator,” the baby interjected. “They’re throwing millions of badly needed bucks down that maritime museum money pit nobody wants. They’re still talking about building that stupid Mardi Gras park but at least we haven’t seen any work start on it.” The kid belched and laughed while I waved the noxious aroma of cigars and booze away from my face.

“How’d you get Cuban cigars into the States?” I asked.

“There’s a lot of room in these Pampers and nobody at an inspection point is really eager to check a fragrant mass in a diaper, if you know what I mean,” Baby 2012 grinned.

“It’s not just in Mobile, either,” Old Man 2011 said. “On the other side of the bay they’re still waiting to shake out the graft from the BP oil spill. And I don’t even want to get into the pettiness coming out of the Baldwin D.A.’s office.”

“That’s no better than the leadership over here,” the baby said as he slapped 2011’s shoulder. “It’s not enough we’ve made it acceptable for circuit judges to use inmates for sexual slaves, but now we might give a pass to prosecutors who want to use their expertise in kiddie perversion to pull the same thing themselves.”

“Now, hold on,” I said, “nobody’s given a green light to that. The trial’s not over and you’re convicting the guy already. You don’t think the people have something to say about all that?”

Both the old man and baby erupted into laughter. “Where do you think all of this stems from?” Old 2011 said. “I heard people taking up for this prosecutor even though they had him dead to rights having phone sex with what he thought was a kid. They used the same investigation methods that have stood up in court for years, same stuff to use to catch people in other crimes but I heard some of these ‘law and order’ types jumping to this guy’s defense.”

“And who elects these clowns to office?” Baby 2012 said. “Who stands by and watches it go on without getting involved? Who complains about spending without showing up at council meetings or contacting their representatives? Who plays along with the racial division that makes a lot of this possible? Who allows downtown to struggle though they’ve been told over and over by far flung experts how important a central business and entertainment district is to a thriving community? If complaints alone amounted to action, this city would be one happening ‘burg.”

“That’s enough,” I said. “If you expect the worst, that’s what you’re going to see. I know people who bust their asses to get this town on the right track, who throw plenty of effort into making it a better place to live, not just for themselves but for everybody.”

“Yeah, I saw them,” 2011 said. “They were plugging along but there’s just not enough of them.”

“Maybe it’s not because others don’t care,” I offered, “but maybe because others haven’t had the good fortune to learn yet how it feels when you do something that matters to the community at large. Maybe if they took that chance they’d get hooked.”

“How you going to get them to do that when all they care about after a long day of treading water is the short relief they get zoning out in the comfort of home?” Old 2011 asked. “Staying alive can be taxing work.”

“But there’s more to life than sleeping and eating,” I said. “Without connection to others, we’re incomplete. And being as jaded as you are isn’t the answer. It’s one thing to be guarded against corruption and it’s another to surrender hope. You’ve got to believe in your power to make a difference.”

“Whatever, bud,” the kid said. “I know what I’m expecting. Mardi Gras that will be just like every other Mardi Gras before it. Same folks, same throws, same parades in the same order. Then spring allergy season before the Hangout Festival and Jazz Fest will pull people out of town for real entertainment. We’ll go through the same hot summer that starts sooner than we wish. Then we’ll have the Nodine trial and he’ll get off, just like the judge and the prosecutor. Then hurricane season and fall allergy season, followed by our biggest distraction: football season. And all the while, exuberant economic news will eventually be tempered by tepid reality, elections will be the lesser of two evils and news outlets will tell what they think their readers want to hear. Blah, blah, blah.”

I knitted my brow and cut my eyes. “You’re a real bundle of joy, alright,” I said. “Sounds like your diaper rash has spread to your brain.”

Baby 2012 smacked on the cigar and blew a smoke ring that floated toward Old 2011 and snagged on one of his eyebrow whiskers.

“Well, while you’re shaking your head at the locals, pal, I’ll be successfully numbed against disappointment,” Baby 2012 said. “Remember, you can’t fall far from the bottom.”

The old man slapped an hourglass on the bar and glanced at the baby. “Speaking of falling, this kid’s got a moonpie to catch,” Old 2011 said. He lifted the smoky infant and headed for the door.

“Happy New Year,” the duo called sarcastically before breaking into laughter.

“It will be if the cable breaks,” I said to myself.

I’m a difficult man to buy gifts for; I admit it. It’s not by design.

Only because people ask what I want and I’m at a loss. I’ve got a roof over my head, clothes on my back, a car that runs and a wife who loves me. I just don’t feel I need much more.

Most importantly, my health is far better than it should be. Of course if Santa’s elves could use some “pixie dust” – it’s a term related to stem cell research, trust me – to grow me a new pair of lungs, then we’re talking a whole new holiday.

Mom learned long ago “socks, boxers and t-shirts” was my standard reply. The fruit of her womb cited Fruit of the Loom because well, I knew I would use them. Flashy, huh?

Some think gizmos are the way to go with me. Maybe…is there a machine that can make me look like Jon Hamm when I wear a suit? How about a device that gives me a Christmas season in Mobile without alternating the air conditioner, heater and a mounted foghorn on my car every few days? If not, don’t worry about it.

Would I use a brand new Macbook Pro if someone plopped it down in front of me? Sure, but there’s no way I’m asking somebody to shell out that kind of jack on my behalf.

Besides, everything has a price. Accept an expensive laptop from Aunt Edna and you’ll be massaging her corn-laden bunions forever. Just be glad she’s not wearing that truss anymore or you’d be stocking up on saddle soap.

What are the best things I ever got? Well, if the length of time I hung onto things was an indicator, the gifts pictured below fit the bill. Straight from Santa’s sports shop, I donned it first thing Christmas morning and didn’t take it off for the rest of the holiday.

The part I never told my parents was that when outside, I started using the helmet to run into everything I could, trees, walls, poles, my sister. It’s a wonder I didn’t break my neck. Brain damage? Well, that’s a lost cause.

My sentimental side managed to hold on to the jersey until it was in tatters. I don’t remember when the helmet disappeared because it moved from ornamental status to a box in a closet sometime in high school. It probably sits in a landfill or second hand store now. I wish I had it back, not as a link to childhood fantasy but more as a symbol of my parents’ desire to see me happy.

But in all the years since, I think the best Christmas present I ever got was something my sister gave to a complete stranger. Catch was, she never knew she bestowed it.

It was 1994 and I was still in the restaurant business, same as my girlfriend. We knew good food and sold it often but if we wanted to eat it, we had to cook it for ourselves. Money was tight. So my gal made arrangements for us to enjoy a swank meal in downtown Mobile’s finest restaurant. It would be her treat, a present to me.

We arrived on a slow night, one of the last before Christmas. Our table was in a room alone where one wall was a massive picture window looking out to the sidewalk and street.

The waiter was a nice enough fellow. When he discovered we were restaurant workers elsewhere downtown, it brought a relaxed vibe to the service.

We ordered as we wanted, with the intention to give no mind to cost for once. Everything was perfect; food, wine, company.

As we shared the dessert, the waiter brought us an envelope and eased away. Inside was a card and note from my sister. She had learned of our plans and stopped by the restaurant earlier in the week to leave her credit card number and instructions for the dinner to be billed to her – Merry Christmas. The tip was left to us.

We broke into astonished laughter. The beneficence only buoyed the night’s mood so we passed it onward. I tucked cash, roughly half the sum of the pricey meal, into the waiter’s book before we rose to leave.

On the sidewalk, we could see through the picture window as the waiter bussed the table. We stopped for a second to gauge his reaction.

He opened the book and then his mouth. Somehow, he sensed us looking at him – maybe he heard our laughter – then wheeled and caught us grinning in the cool night. He raised his hands, palms out as he mouthed “no,” then darted from the room.

The waiter flew out the front door of the restaurant and bounded up to us on the sidewalk.

“I can’t take this,” he protested. “This is way too much.”

“No, it’s fine,” we said. “Someone paid for the meal and we were planning on spending twice that anyway. We’re still making out like bandits.”

He paused. “Are you sure?”

We nodded. “Merry Christmas.”

He looked at the money, then us and tilted his head back. “I made my rent!” he shouted and nearly skipped back inside.

It might have been the best money my sister ever spent on me. My girlfriend and I enjoyed a mere indulgence to our palates but what someone else derived from it fed our souls.

And we all kept something alive that should always be in abundance anyway.

Hope your holiday season is filled with love and contentment. Only peace of mind can bring peace on earth and it’s pretty hard to buy that.

Even now, I think of Cicely. Especially this time of year.

Cicely was unique. Filled with natural beauty, she was quirky, unpredictable, funny and eccentric. But there was also an abundance of sincerity and warmth, plus surprising bits of wisdom. She entertained any perspective so long as it was thoughtful.

I was a lot younger then but I still knew a good thing when I found it and Cicely seemed too good to be true. Most likely because she wasn’t.

Cicely was a fictional town – Cicely, Alaska – the setting for the TV series Northern Exposure that cast a high-minded net across the American consciousness from 1990 – 95 and pulled a bounty of awards into CBS’ boat. It was both a product of the time and something that exceeded it.

The national culture’s attention turned northwest at the end of the ‘80s. Seattle was the hot new city, the place with buzz. That focus flowed out into the region, up the coast.

The creators of the seminal medical show St. Elsewhere created a fish-out-of-water tale about a young New York City doctor strong-armed into relocating to a tiny Alaskan town filled with unexpected characters. The tension between the transplant, his expectations and experiences drove the series but its quality was what snared attention.

Superficially, it was refreshing enough. The characters were a grab bag of personalities and the actors who breathed life into them were well cast. They represented myriad perspectives in circumstances and situations never seen on television before.

The ears were delighted thanks to an eclectic soundtrack tied in by a radio station far too wonderful for reality.

The show was rife with creativity. The writing seemed almost poetic at times.

They didn’t sell the audience short, plunging into metaphysics and philosophy at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t uncommon see Kafka or Freud pop up in a scene, or to hear quantum physics or existentialism drop into a conversation that began with whale blubber.

The characters cared for each other and showed that love in their actions. I’ve heard stories in the years since of preachers who took this quintessentially secular show laced with varying religious beliefs, even pagan, and used it as the basis for sermons on how Christians should treat other and the world.

Beneath it all beat the soul of an artist and the longing for community. Cicely was unafraid. The men in town celebrated every spring with a naked run through the city streets. They had festivals at the drop of a hat.

The townsfolk enthusiastically supported the artistic endeavors of one of its chief characters, regardless of whether they saw the ultimate goal or not. Whether he was welding or building a trebuchet, they knew a payoff was worth their initial bewilderment.

During the long dark of the Alaskan winter, when Cicely’s sunlight winnowed to near nothing, the artist scavenged lights from around town for his annual mid-winter sculpture. What resulted was typical for Cicely: a spotlight on the human condition.

I think above all what this show sought to do was put the wonder back in a world that often seemed mundane or cruel. It was enough to make producer David Chase, who went on to create The Sopranos, to decry its wide-eyed perspective insufficiently dark for his tastes.

Perhaps most relevant was that the show was buoyed by the belief a town could be small and still be cosmopolitan. With the right gathering of folks, those who want to embrace everything life offers, who cherish eccentricity, creativity and communal experience, population counts don’t matter.

A friend who once lived in Alaska told me it’s littered with the mantra “Follow your bliss.” They know life’s short and sweet essence.

I wanted so dearly to find a place like that. I already had in a way, because the ideal was within me. I doubted the physical manifestation would ever emerge, though.

So why now? Why does Cicely arise again?

Well, part of it is the colder months and the winter solstice, a time of pines, thoughts of snow and northern lights and stars. Anyone who’s ever been to the northwest can attest to its allure, to the mystery that laces through those aromatic forests and its overwhelming beauty.

Because of holiday parties filled with artists and their community leaders, people willing to invest themselves in the place where they live and do hard work for everyone’s benefit.

I think about Cicely when I consider the sliver of the Mobile populace that really makes things hum around here in the arts world. They’re a town within a town, a small heart of Mobile that enjoys its own wonder and eccentricity.

I think about that doctor in Cicely, the ways I sometimes feel a stranger here and the ways I don’t. I ponder the way I couldn’t wait for Mobile to come to me over the years, that I had to take those steps toward it to coax the same from the other side.

That’s true anywhere. It’s not just Mobile or even little make-believe Cicely. You have to accept a place for what it is before you can make it what you want.

They say smell is the sense tied tightest to memory but, for me, nothing brings the winter holidays to life like music. As a kid, I feverishly dug out the Christmas albums like they were a gift all their own, as much a part of the holiday as evergreens and wrapping paper.

American Christmas is like everything else here: a mélange of cultural influences. Middle Eastern roots, Northern European customs, Roman festivals, New England environs, Christian beliefs and pagan rituals have all been tossed into the Yuletide blender to get what we now think of as a traditional Christmas.

My favorite holiday music is that same slurry of international flavor, rooted in a genre that is now contemporary America’s version of classical music: jazz. It’s inescapable this time of year. Whether it’s John Coltrane running through “My Favorite Things” or Mel Torme’s “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” jazz’s combination of elegance and playfulness is ideal for a time rooted in both sincerity and childish wonder.

So, we’ll skip the usual literary musings and pass out special seasonal treats. Here’s a little something for every holiday mood…

We’ve got the purposefully vintage:
From the Squirrel Nut Zippers…

The sardonic:
From Miles Davis, with vocals from Bob Dorough (of Schoolhouse Rock fame)…

The wryly hip:
From Babs Gonzales…

The one and only Louis Armstrong…

The incomparable Ella Fitzgerald…

And of course, the cool:
From Herbie Hancock…

From the Vince Guaraldi Trio…

Happy holidays, y’all!

From the 29th floor of the RSA Tower you can see a long ways in clear mid-November air: along the concrete thread of the Bayway to the Eastern Shore, south to Dog River, to Saraland in the north and to the low ridges bulwarking west Mobile from the historic sectors.

Despite our lofty perch, what we were looking for was much further below. The answers were at street level.

The meeting room was filled with a scattering of names and personalities synonymous with downtown.Bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, law enforcement, artists, what have you, they were all summoned together by the Downtown Business Alliance in an attempt to work through some issues with the city’s oldest quarter.

The chief facilitators were representatives from the Responsible Hospitality Institute, a 30-year-old non-profit organization that helps cities manage hospitality zones. What they offered was expertise gained through working with other municipalities throughout the rest of the nation for decades.

The ensemble was divided into six groups – entertainment; multi-use sidewalk; public safety; venue safety; transportation; quality of life – each around their own conference table and tasked with discussing various components of hospitality zone health. It was all geared toward making downtown more vibrant, enhancing its potential as an engine for economics and quality of life.

The group I sat with was the crux of the argument: entertainment. We were there to set the bait because unless there is a reason for people to be downtown, none of the other things matter.

We went around the table, talking about what downtown’s difficulties are, what visitors say, what they don’t. None of it is likely news to anyone reading this. Tourists’ remarks on what they see downtown is depressing. Little sidewalk activity, no sense of life.

It was noted that isn’t a blanket statement, how specific events generate activity but without a chili cook-off or Bayfest or Mardi Gras, there was no foot traffic. On the weekends, before 10 p.m. anyway, it can seem desolate.

In one of the exercises, each of us named cities we found impressive, that had the vibe we felt Mobile needed. The names that cropped up most? New Orleans, Portland, Ore. and Austin, Texas.

The difference between all of those places and Mobile, other than size, was highly obvious. What drives their energy is local involvement. Without their citizens willing to participate in festivals and events, none of them would have placed on that list.

It all comes down to a question of culture. What is your local culture like? What does it value? What does it seek? What does it prioritize?

The three cities on our list all have a romance with the arts. They all love music. They cherish their bohemian aspects. They all strive for authenticity, rebuking the monochromatic homogeny that can seem so pervasive in modern America.

Does that characterize Mobile?

It was mentioned over and over in our group that downtown seems to lack a certain diversity of entertainment options. But, how lucrative would that be to offer such in abundance? The small number of venues that are there now fight for every customer they can get. Would entertainment for smaller niches be able to keep a business afloat?

We all know downtown’s backstory, or at least we should. It was fine for centuries, hummed along as the locus of local life. Then a confluence of events merged.

The Post-War Boom brought tens of thousands of new residents here. The city tripled in area. The American car culture and suburbanization whisked the Azalea City away from the historic center.

The malls were developed and the power brokers who developed real estate, commerce and housing, who bought ads in the single daily newspaper, were able to influence public sentiment.

Simultaneously, African-Americans who for generations were limited to “their own” business district had a very human reaction to the fall of Jim Crow. They flocked downtown, eager to feel the freedoms they had been denied. Sadly, this led to the slow disintegration of what had been the black business district while the increased color on downtown streets created unease in a sizable segment of the population, those unsettled by change. The folks out west who benefited financially from such were more than glad to let such sentiment fester.

Within a few decades, what had been a town where people walked and rode streetcars was changed. Downtown continued to have some daytime business, but for the most part, it was abandoned.

I moved to Mobile in the early ‘80s, settling into west Mobile. I remember the tales I heard about midtown and downtown before I knew any better. Within a decade, I found out for myself how ridiculous those stories were but sadly, I still see and hear their remnants knocking around beyond the interstate.

It’s better downtown, but it’s not what it should be. Things seemed to plateau in the mid-‘90s and progress has become harder, but still incremental.

If there is going to be any future in downtown, it’s going to have to come from the locals. No one can do that for us.

We have to see what pulls people downtown as is and replicate as much as possible. That’s the proof in the pudding. It might not suit all of us, especially not those like myself whose tastes and sensibilities might be somewhat esoteric in this general environment, but it’s what has to happen. Otherwise, the stigmas that persist about downtown will always exist.

Downtown will only be what we as Mobilians, all Mobilians, want it to be. What we see there now is a product of us, a reflection of us, and always will be.