M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I

I found the Sterlington, Louisiana Library, a new building only five years old, located a hop, skip and a jump away from where I now live. A big rig got impatient with me looking for the right turn and blew his fog-horn honk up my jeans, gave me the startlement treatment, while I thought, what the heck, the library can wait, pulled into the Post Office to score a sheet of commemorative stamps for poets Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, Robert Hayden , Sylvia Plath and others. I kept on driving down Highway 20 with several books on the passenger seat to visit Lorelei Books in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which I had heard rumor was poet-friendly and my information was correct; Vicksburg, the place where Jefferson Davis launched his political career and where Union troops raised the Stars and Stripes on July 4, 1863, signaling the beginning of the end to the Civil War, sharing the road with a fertilizer truck from Oauchita Parish and more big rigs barreling down the right-hand side of the highway that was decorated with fat curlers of hay bales sitting on the green grass as I listened to a CD of Alison Krauss that I’d just taken out from the library, almost too good to be lucky, finding casinos everywhere along the Mississippi and singing a song to myself about how to spell the name of the state that we sang as kids—M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. When I got back home, I listened to the debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney.