A golf trip and a wedding sent me to Nashville and Charleston, South Carolina on back-to-back weekends.
The golf trip to Nashville was a house warming conclave of Jackson’s Bushwood Golf Group (BGG) — a group of about 30 middle to old aged men who play at the three Randy Watkins golf courses.
My dear friend Kevin Russell, long one of Roger Parrott’s right-hand colleagues at Belhaven College moved there with wife Linda Kay, to be near daughter and son-in-law Emily and Matt and their beautiful new one-year old granddaughter Ruby.
They join a long list of my friends who eventually moved to be near their grandchildren. Who can blame them?
Kevin’s move seems to be a God thing. While visiting Nashville, he drove by the Christ Presbyterian Church. Out of curiosity, he visited their website to check out the church. Turns out the church was looking for an executive director to manage their three churches’ campuses and large staff. For Kevin, a man of deep faith, it was the perfect job in the perfect place.
When Kevin told me I said, “I’m happy for you but sad for me.” To alleviate Kevin’s separation anxiety, eight BGG members traveled to Jackson for three nights of camaraderie and two days of golf.
Six drove but Jeff Good and I decided to try the new Southwest direct flight to Nashville. The plane was packed. Not a single empty seat. Flying time was a nifty 45 minutes or so. This is a great new route for the Jackson airport.
We had hoped to play the fine Greystone course, squeaking in before a women’s college tournament (won by Millsaps College’s Annie Piggott). But the rain moved us to the Montgomery Bell State Park. Not so luxurious but a fun hilly layout. Our second round the next day was at the Hermitage golf course, one of the top 10 courses in Tennessee, associated with President Andrew Jackson’s ancestral home.
Everybody knows that Nashville is booming and the affluence and prosperity of the city was obvious as you drove around. We Jackson metro area residents can hope and pray that such growth and vibrancy may one day come to Jackson.
One obvious feature in Nashville is the amount of inner-city residential buildings. This is something you just don’t see much of in Jackson, but it is key to reviving the inner city area, which, in turn, seems to be key to reviving the metro area as a whole.
We spent one night wandering around downtown’s Broadway Street, which was jammed packed with tourists and visitors on a Friday night. There must have been two dozen music venues and four dozen bands playing. Restaurants galore. Oh for downtown Jackson to have a 10th of that.
Our city and state leaders should work together to revitalize Capitol Street. All we need is just one nice street with restaurants, shops, music venues and weekend activity. That could be the locus around which downtown could revive.
Jackson’s Regions Plaza building, the tallest building in the city, was recently purchased for a mere three million dollars by Kumar Bhavanasi, a New Jersey tech entrepreneur who already owns the Pinnacle building.
His plan is to invest millions to turn the building into a residential building with up to 200 units.
In the past, you had to come to the workplace because that’s where the computers and technology resided. But those days have changed. Thanks to high speed wire and wireless communication and computer advances, people can work from anywhere, so the demand for office space has declined. Converting low demand office buildings into high demand residential buildings is a big new trend.
That’s the sort of thing that could really turn Jackson around. Let’s hope Bhavanasi succeeds.
The next weekend sent Ginny and I to Charleston, South Carolina, where Melissa Archer and Eric Felton were married in a beautiful outdoor venue. Melissa is the daughter of our dear friends Bob and Kay Archer who years ago decided to adopt the Emmerichs, for reasons we do not know.
Turns out Jackson-Charleston round trip airfare was expensive with bad travel times, but there was a super-cheap one-way ticket back departing at the perfect time.
So we hitched a 11-hour, one-way ride with Jeff and Tracy Weill, also in our church, Covenant Presbyterian, along with the Archers. Eleven hours in a car with another couple is doable. Twenty-two hours is a big ask.
As it turned out, time flew by and we talked and laughed and joked the whole way. Jeff did yeoman’s duty as the main driver, with Tracy and I filling in as it got dark. We stopped in Birmingham for lunch at a cool Mexican downtown restaurant. Birmingham, too, has far more downtown residential buildings than Jackson.
Historic Charleston is like a clean New Orleans. It’s become one of the top five tourist destinations in the U. S. and the city is brimming with downtown residents. The city just hums with activity and vibrancy. Oh to get this in Jackson.
I returned to Jackson exhausted but not too tired to make it to a 6 p.m. talk on the Israel situation at the Beth Israel synagogue on Old Canton Road. Marla and Erik Hearon invited me.
The speaker was a long-time expert on Israel from the Middle East Forum. I was curious about his take on the recent anti-Israel protests around the world concerning Gaza. I also wanted to see Erk, a retired major general of the Mississippi Air National Guard who flew countless missions during the Iraq war. A stroke has left him wheelchair bound.
The speaker, Dexter Van Zile, gave a powerful talk. Although Catholic, he has grown to be a passionate opponent of anti-Semitism. He gave a historical insight to the latest rise of anti-Semitism, which has plagued the Jews forever.
Words got tense when someone in the audience accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Zile gave an emotional defense, pointing out that civilian casualties have exceeded military casualties in all the recent wars.
If Gaza is genocide, then was Hiroshima and Nagasaki genocide? Van Zile argued.
