Sebastien DeChaunac, former Ole Miss tennis player from France, raced for the ball but lost the point, then looked into the stands and yelled to the lady always there and always dressed in red, white, and blue.

“Throw me a cookie!” he said, his accent audible through the crowd. 

 That was always one of her favorite stories to tell.

Her cookies were unique and special. And unforgettable, even in the heat of a college tennis match on a warm Mississippi spring day.

 Eleanor Shaw died today. Many knew her as the cookie lady. She always brought a bin of them to Ole Miss tennis matches for coaches and players and fans. And for anybody who would take one. Most of the time I took several.

 One day I reached in and got a couple of them, then soon went back for more.

“You’re going to have to put those away,” I told her.

“Looks like you’re doing a pretty good job of that yourself,” she quipped and laughed.

 She had turned 90 just this week. She played competitive tennis into her mid-70s. She rarely missed an Ole Miss tennis match and loved to attend women’s basketball games. She played both sports at Ole Miss and also softball and badminton. They were considered intramural sports back in the late 1930s when she played. Officially sanctioned women’s sports at the college level had not yet come along.

Born in North Carolina in 1918, she won the Mississippi state high school tennis singles title in 1935 for McComb. She graduated from Ole Miss in 1939 and attended graduate school at North Carolina.

She went to matches and games for all Ole Miss sports through the years, but tennis was her first love. She was well-known throughout the state and the South for her game on the court and later as a member of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. We all knew her for her loyalty to Ole Miss and its student-athletes and coaches.

And her cookies.

“Eleanor was a legend in her own right by her accomplishments on the tennis court, but she will best be remembered as one of the all-time great supporters in the history of Ole Miss sports,” Ole Miss men’s tennis head coach Billy Chadwick said. “At the heart of the success of our tennis program has been Eleanor’s presence at every match and, of course, her famous homemade cookies. We will miss her greatly.”

After a match this season, I gave her a ride home. She lived in an ante-bellum house high on a hill, halfway between Bramlett Blvd. and The Square on Jackson Ave. in the heart of Oxford.

She gave me a tour of the place, pushing her walker slowly and pointing out this and that, an hour or so spent back in time to another era, as I looked over the grounds and moved from room to room. She seemed to enjoy showing me her home and her accomplishments, much like she enjoyed those of the Ole Miss players through the years and being a part of them.

I am sure many around the world who knew her paused today when they heard the news of her death. Hers was indeed a life that was memorable.

-Written by Jeff Roberson

omspirit.com

Julie Chadwick, Billy Chadwick, and Eleanor Shaw with her bin of cookies

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

All the hands that press against
and hold the broken pieces firm,
that wash the bruised and dusty feet
they are my friends, they are my Love

All the eyes that watch the sky
for signs of hope and life to come,
that deeply hold me in my own-
they are my sisters, they are my Love

All the tender words that call-
that carry light and lift the wall,
safe a voice when dark surrounds-
they are my brothers, they are my Love

All these arms persist embrace
in spite of spite and rancor
that never have a moment failed
they are my mothers, they are my Love

All the tears that fortify
and bridge the gap between our hearts-
they break the tragic, heal the spoiled
they are my fathers, they are my Love

All the prayers that clothe me here,
a woven strand me swaddled in
that strength that rolled the stone away
they are my family, they are my Love

All the silent, sitting ones
that need not speak but still are known
they wait beside the sickbed long
they are my homes, they are my Love

And all the songs they sing to me
those tender things, the beating wings
that urge me on and cool my fear-
they are my forebears, they are my Love

You who bear the mark of Christ
all whose form his love has made
it’s you I call to welcome me
you are my Lord, you are my Love

-Matthew Clark

Oxford, MS

The Hogwarts ghosts have a tradition I think worth borrowing. They celebrate their Deathday, a party marking the date they quit this mortal coil. If a child’s birthday leans forward–first steps, a bike, a license, the vote–a Deathday looks back at a life well lived and, for the lucky, well ended. It’s a lovely spring morning as I write this, just as it was six years ago on the day I said goodbye to my father.

Most of us have a pretty good idea about how we want to die: at home, at peace, quickly, with family, without pain. And at a ripe old age. But progress begets paradox: we’ve gotten so good at the last goal, it swallowed the others, so we live longer but die slower. Two out of three people die in hospitals or nursing homes, often alone, the process prolonged by a conspiracy of hope, fear, bureaucracy, inertia. When researchers not long ago interviewed family members of the recently deceased, half of them said their loved one did not get the support he or she needed at the end. There’s a specter to haunt us, a death worth fearing, altogether different from the death we can embrace.

As my generation journeys deeper into middle age, we talk about this quietly, live through our parents’ passing and learn how little we know about the journey’s end. Death will never be pretty–its sights and smells too close and crude. And it will never come under our control: it gallops where we tiptoe, rips up our routines, burns our very breath with its heat and sting. And yet while sorrow is certain, fear is not. “She had a very good death,” a friend says of her mother, and I have an idea of what she means and don’t hear it as a shrug of denial or contradiction.

I asked a doctor friend what makes the difference, once the battle is out of her hands. “Fear,” she said, “and regret. Take those away, and what’s left is peace.” Two weeks before my father died, he sat in the sun watching one of his granddaughters play soccer. Three days before, as his strength visibly failed, three generations were able to come and be with him. The hospice angels made him comfortable. Neighbors brought pies; the pastor brought prayers. On Sunday night his granddaughters read him a bedtime story. My brother and husband took turns keeping watch. He did not wake up Monday morning and died the following afternoon, with his wife of 49 years and his children beside him. He was 82.

How is it that the one event we know with absolute certainty will occur is still one we improvise? Do we lower our voices, dress in black, save a lock of hair as the Victorians did and wove into jewelry? Do you let young children see a corpse–the very word suddenly cold and empty because his flesh and blood no longer matter, his meaning filling the space once his presence is gone? “Is that Grandpa?” our 4-year-old wondered. “No, honey,” my husband told her. “He’s not here anymore. That’s just his body.” She worked at this, how the arms that held her and the lap she sat in were no longer him. “You know how when we go to Florida, we leave our winter coats at home because we won’t need them there? Well, he just left this behind because he doesn’t need it anymore.” And this appeared to make perfect sense to her, and she went to play, full of love and certainty, and we all took a walk in the watery light of late afternoon.

There are those–soldiers and nurses, poets and priests–for whom death is a sure companion. But most of us treat it as a notorious celebrity we watch from afar, fascinated but removed, until we have no choice, preferring myth to truth. Do we raise the odds of dying well if we pitch our tents within sight of the cemetery, feel the cold earth and vow to make a bucket list, make resolutions, make amends? Ten million people watch Professor Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture on YouTube; see the shining, dying man; and quietly promise themselves to shift out of neutral, stop being stupid about the stupid things. I celebrate Daddy’s Deathday for who he was and what he made us, a day when gratitude came to life.

-Nancy Gibbs, Time Magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1734819,00.html

I want to give the world a foot massage
“Take a load off,” I’d say
“You’ve had a long week”

I want to buy backpacks for crack babies
Teach them E=mc2
Sing them the theme to Fat Albert
Show them the correct dosage of sugar for kick-ass Kool-Aid
Tell them their mothers’ addictions
Were not predestination, were not bad luck
But just were
And they are free to be
Someone’s solution instead of the symbol
Of someone’s problem

I want to host a banquet
For the orphans of Gaza
The widows of Darfur
Pile the tables high with falafel
And kisra with bamia
Fill glasses with crystal water
Mugs with guhwah, chai, and goat’s milk
Raise a toast to their fallen loved ones
And send them to down-filled beds
For a night of rest
Without the sound of Kalashnikovs
I want to tell them they are no longer refugees
They are Mustafa and Jamilah
And they can call someplace home again

I want to give prosthetics to the war children
Of Kabul and Mazar and Kandahar
Watch them play soccer and basketball
Their new limbs gracefully awkward
Their war dreams lessening in intensity
Their eyes losing their haunted cast
Their steps unfettered by the fear
of land mines in the sand
I want to tell them they are worth more
Than sodomy and poppy seed
That they can write their own history

I want to comfort everyone everywhere
Share and bear their joys and sorrows
Whisper with prophetic imagination
Of a new world with old roots
A melancholy tale with an uplifting end
When he and she, you and me
Can love with reckless abandon
Others more than ourselves

But today, I drive by the man
With his cardboard sign
My windows rolled up against the sunny day
A dollar bill snugly ensconced
In the folds of my wallet
And I sing with Mahalia,
His eye is on the sparrow

-http://www.xanga.com/negrito7

from the days after the Oxford tornado of 2008…

Before I picked up my life and moved it to Colombia, I spent every Thursday night at a little restaurant right outside of Oxford. I’d leave school, headed toward home, and stop at The Sizzler to wait tables and make some extra money for the week. It was just a job at first and a chance to hang out with a family I’d worked for at a summer camp what seemed like ages ago. But that sentiment didn’t last long.

Thursday nights were the slowest of the weekend, but packed full of regulars that weasled their way into my Southern heart. The couple that always sits by the door and likes glass glasses and lots of sweetner. A man and his aging mother, him with his paper and her watching him eat, glad to be out with her son for awhile. Grandparents that drink real Coke with a straw and always order fried oysters and turnip greens. And university professors whose husbands carry chocolate in their shirt pockets.

A retired English teacher was the other Thursday night waitress and she and I would bustle through the place, slinging steaks, pouring tea over clinking ice, and topping off coffee cups. She taught me how to carry four plates at once and two glasses in one hand and how to sweep like a mad woman and use a dust pan with a giraffe stance. We dodged each other effortlessly, sweating, giggling occassionally at ill mannered diners, rarely slowing down before closing time. And then we’d sit across from each other counting our tip money and talking about life a little before we called it a night.

Yesterday, I got two boxes in the mail. Two boxes packed carefully and mailed from that little restaurant just outside of Oxford. Magazines, peanut butter, gum, school supplies, and handwritten letters. I recognized all of the writing easily and smiled at the thought of that rowdy cook scrawling me a note and teared up a bit as I read a letter from Judy who said, “I’m the new Thursday Emily although I haven’t been able to fill your shoes just yet.”

But the letter that I read over and over again was the one in the flowing script of that retired English teacher. The script I’ve seen on countless tickets hanging from an order board. And I couldn’t help but smile a little and picture her sitting across from me talking about all the animals that she feeds, the children that she raised, the husband that she loved.

It is, after all, Thursday.

-Emily Witt

Oxford friend living in Colombia for a while

emilywithaheart.com

Here’s a aggregate of the musical artists for this weekend’s festival.

Avett Brothers

Colour Revolt

Dirty Dozen Brass Band

Aaron Hall Band

Hill Country Blues Revue

Blue Mountain

Afrissippi

Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele

The Cooters

The Damnwells

(sorry about the screaming girl)

Redemption. That wasn’t all winning the Southeastern Conference Tournament last weekend was about for the Ole Miss men’s tennis team. But that was definitely part of it.

Ole Miss was the preseason pick to win the SEC overall. Early season losses to Georgia and Florida all but ended their hopes.

The Rebels won all their other regular season conference matches. So when the time came to be able to redeem themselves and prove they are the best team in the league this season, they jumped at the chance to take advantage of it.

Second-seed Ole Miss rolled past tenth-seed Kentucky, third-seed Tennessee, and fourth-seed Florida to bring home the hardware from the tourney, which this spring was held at the University of Arkansas.

“These guys had very high expectations,” Billy Chadwick, for nearly three decades the tennis coach at Ole Miss, said. “And now they are playing their best tennis.”

For Chadwick, who along with wife Julie and sons Lyon and Carr such a visible and important family of Oxford for years now, winning this trophy again had been a long time coming. The Rebels won it in 1997. They’ve been to the finals four times since then, including the most recent three.

But they hadn’t been able to win the finale, which the past two seasons featured as their competition the nation’s No. 1 ranked team at the time, Georgia.

That Florida beat top-seed Georgia last Saturday to pit the Gators against the Rebels in Sunday’s title match may or may not have been the perfect scenario for Ole Miss. But it worked out well, obviously.

Ole Miss men’s tennis has been a national power for two decades under Chadwick’s direction. Their support, from long-time Oxonians, from people who have relocated to the area, from alums who have caught on to all the winning along with the Ole Miss students who support them, has grown substantially. It’s been a fun and amazing climb to see them reach a high level of competition year after year.

Chadwick’s program is a world-wide melting pot. There’ve been players like Mississippi’s Dave Randall, an All-American and SEC champion in the late 1980s, and Mahesh Bhupathi of India, at Ole Miss in the mid-1990s and now with 40 professional titles to his credit as well as 10 Grand Slam crowns during a stellar pro career.

This year Chadwick’s program brings its past and present together. Former Ole Miss champion Alex Hartman of Sweden, an All-American here the early part of this new century, is a volunteer coach with the team. He’s part of an important and long-standing Swedish connection for Ole Miss tennis. Current full-time assistant coach Toby Hansson, an SMU alum and native of Sweden, has been with the program for two years. Chris Rea of Madison Central High in this state is a student assistant this spring after playing on the team the past few seasons.

Current team member Bram ten Berge of The Netherlands, a Classics major, was recently inducted into Phi Beta Kappa at Ole Miss. Jonas Berg of Sweden was named Most Valuable Player of the SEC Tournament last weekend.

Robbye Poole, a South Carolinian who played some years of his junior tennis career in Mississippi, is joined on the squad by Erling Tveit of Norway, Jakob Klaeson of Sweden, Matthias Wellermann of Germany, Kalle Norberg of Sweden, and Tucker Vorster of South Africa.

Tveit, the No. 1 singles and doubles player for Ole Miss currently, was recently named to the SEC Men’s Tennis Community Service Team. A native of Oslo in his home country, Tveit has been involved with the Oxford Food Pantry and with Special Olympics.

The men’s tennis program at Ole Miss is truly a window to the world, and the depth and breadth of it has become an amazing part of life in Oxford.

The program’s best finish was 1995 when Ole Miss lost to Stanford in the national championship finals played that year at the University of Georgia.

As is the case this time every year, the Rebels now wait. They wait on another NCAA Tournament bid, and they wait to be announced as a host site again for rounds one and two of an NCAA Regional Tournament. Both of those announcements come on April 29. The NCAA Regional is May 10-11. The National Championship Tournament following the Regional is in Tulsa, Okla., May 17-20.

Last week, Virginia was still the nation’s only unbeaten team at No. 1. Ohio State was No. 2, and Georgia was No. 3.

Three of the Rebels’ four losses this season are to those teams.

Their only other loss was to Florida. And as of last weekend, the Rebels certainly redeemed themselves quite nicely for all the above.

The Rebels found out this week they are now the fourth-ranked team in all of college tennis for this season. They hope to finish No. 1.

They just might do it, too.

What a program.

- Jeff Roberson

Ole Miss Spirit

Oxford, MS

(picture by Wesley Hitt)

Motherhood is defined by life and love; war is shadowed by death and loss. Mothers take care; soldiers face danger. The two seem antithetical, as Frances Richey knows well. Fran is a yoga teacher who writes poetry and is opposed to the war in Iraq. Her son, Ben, is a West Point graduate and Green Beret who served two tours there.

The bridge across the chasm that grew between them is made of words, a heart-rending collection of Fran’s poetry titled “The Warrior.” On its cover is a very old photo of her only child, a flaxen-haired toddler in a striped shirt who appears to be waving goodbye. The picture is testimony to the fact that no mother ever sends an adult into battle. She sends her baby. If she is lucky, her baby comes back home.

He will leave again. Again, I ‘ ll be broken, a relic of that young woman I was when I stood over his bassinet and hoped his rash would heal if I changed to cloth.

Ben convinced his mother that he needed to serve his country, even if it was in a way that was not easy for her to understand. But she was unconvinced about this war. “This is a terrible administration,” she says on the phone, “but most of the soldiers are really noble people and they’re being wasted and that’s wrong. But I stopped arguing with Ben about it after he came back the first time because he was in so much pain. Politics was not important. Healing the relationship was the important thing. I think he understood it better by reading the poems because poetry communicates in a different way.”

He left it out of sight, as if recalling my refusal, when he was a boy, to buy him one. The only evidence it existed, a small brown square of paper, slightly buckled, three holes shot through at the heart, lying on the table by his will.

For Fran the poems were not political, except to the extent that all politics is personal. Sometimes everyone forgets that war is not a shout but a whisper: a folded flag, an empty bedroom, a woman who has lost that part of her life that made her feel most alive. “To that mother, the surge is not going well,” says Fran Richey.

His head was freshly shaved. A blue square bandage on his shoulder covered the small pox shot they all get before they ship out to Iraq. In days he ‘ d be cargo on some army plane, and I ‘ d be in New York City listening to his message on my machine. I save all his messages.

PBS marked the beginning of the sixth year in Iraq with a documentary called “Bush’s War.” It recounted the welter of petty fiefdoms, egocentric agendas and failures of understanding that led a small group of middle-aged men to send a large group of young men and women into this debacle. “Headquarters heroes,” one former CIA man called them derisively, antsy to target Iraq while the World Trade Center was still smoking.

There is only one reason to go to war, and the architects of this one have never come close to satisfying it. It is that you have a cause so great that it justifies asking people to sacrifice their children.

Last Mother ‘ s Day, when he was incommunicado, nothing came. Three days later, a message in my box; a package, the mail room closed. I went out into the lobby, banged my fist against the desk. When they gave it to me, I clutched it to my chest, sobbing like an animal. I spoke to no one, did not apologize. I didn ‘ t care about the gift. It was the note I wanted,the salt from his hand, the words.

Fran and Ben are on a book tour together, stopping at Fort Bragg and West Point. The child in the striped shirt, age 33, leaves the Army in July. “Before he was a warrior,” his mother writes in one of her poems, “he was a boy.”

-Anna Quindlen

Newsweek