Fame

CAPE FEAR – Their eyes always seem to widen and their eyebrows raise a bit. Usually they smile a little. All of this and more when I mention I’m from Oxford.

That’s normally just after the “Mississippi” answer I first give when asked where I live.

We were traveling by ferry from Southport, N. C., to Bald Head Island out in the Atlantic for a wedding. It’s the only way to get there and just a 20-minute ride. But you can learn a lot about folks in that amount of time.

We’d asked a passenger if we could sit down with her since we’d just gotten on board right before departure.

“Sure,” she said, as we proceeded to talk about things like where we were headed and what for and if we’d been to Bald Head before.

She and her husband live in Virginia and have another house here. Their kids and grandkids love it, she said. She does, too, I could tell.

Then came the question, “So where are you from?”

“Mississippi. He lives near Tupelo. Baldwyn, to be exact,” I told her concerning my dad who was seated across from her.

“I live in Oxford.” And that’s when she became even more interested in us.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’ve heard that’s a very nice place.”

I mentioned that William Faulkner’s daughter, Jill, had died just a few days earlier in Charlottesville. I’d read it in the newspaper. In Oxford. In the Eagle.

A lot of people have heard about Oxford, about how nice it is, about those of us who live there, especially the famous among us, past and present. More are finding out about it, about us, every day.

Some of it is because of Faulkner and John Grisham. Some of it is because of Ole Miss. Some of it is the attention Oxford receives through publications and websites on college and living and working and retiring. And the historic Presidential Debate upcoming.

I was in the Downtown Grill a year and a half or so ago. It was around Christmas and the students were away. A retired couple was sitting at the table next to me. They were waiting for another couple, friends they’d made since both had moved to Oxford.

They were from greater Los Angeles. The ones they awaited from New Jersey.

“I was in a doctor’s office sitting in the waiting room. She had an appointment,” the man said, nodding toward his wife. “I was looking through a magazine and saw a page on Oxford. When she came out, I asked her if she wanted to move to Mississippi. She said I just want to get out of here.”

Meaning southern California. The story, they said, was basically the same for their friends from Jersey who were arriving any minute for dinner. At a restaurant. On the Square. In Oxford.

They said they were all happy in Oxford. They love their back yards and hearing the birds and enjoying the slower pace.

After our recent short stay on Bald Head Island, which included the rehearsal dinner that night and wedding the next day, we ferried back across to Southport and headed to a reception in Wilmington.

There was the brother in law of the groom, a North Carolina State grad, who wanted to talk Oxford and Ole Miss sports.

“Eli’s living in Oxford now,” I told him. “Just got married and they plan to live there in the off-season.”

He mentioned Phillip Rivers when talking about recent Wolfpack gridiron success.

The bride’s father, a former Mississippi State football player in the early 1960s who played in a bowl game vs. N.C. State, said he’d attended school with Rivers’ grandmother at Tupelo High.

There was the friend of the bride originally from Pontotoc, a former classmate at the W in Columbus, who drove down from Richmond with her fiance in their small red convertible with the Virginia license plate “OLEMSFN” proudly displayed.

Of course, we talked Ole Miss sports. Football, mostly. And Oxford.

I told them to meet us at Wake Forest in early September when the Rebels and Demon Deacons get together.

There was the couple from northern New Jersey at our table at the reception eager to talk about Oxford and Grisham, when I told them I live there.

The groom is a Delaware grad. So is his best man. The best man’s son, a polite grade-school-age boy, is a Pats fan. He didn’t seem overly impressed when I told him I went to school where Eli did and that Eli lives in Oxford.

Maybe if it had been Tom Brady.

I invited them to Oxford anyway, to Mississippi to visit the bride and the old college friend, the groom.

We left Wrightsville Beach just across the Intracoastal Waterway from Wilmington early Sunday morning headed to Athens. I was covering game three of the Ole Miss-Georgia baseball series. The teams had split the first two games.

I wonder if Athens raises eyebrows, widens eyes, and brings a slight smile and a look as if to say “tell me more” as Oxford always does when I tell people I live there.

- Jeff Roberson
Ole Miss Spirit
Oxford, MS