Eight days late and after thirty-six hours of labor from my hard-working mother, I was born at the Jackson-Madison County General Hospital on a hot April day in 1976. Forty-two years later, I am an attending physician in that very same department. It’s very unusual for a physician to practice in their hometown, but I am thankful that my journey has brought me back to where I started. My earliest memory of life in Jackson is from First Presbyterian Playschool.
Read MoreMy daughter is in the fifth grade. She’s just beginning that transition from child to full-blown adolescent. And with that transition inevitably comes the time when I’m not fun enough to hang out with on a Friday night. I’m experiencing that right now. Sure, it wounds the pride a little, but I knew it was coming, so we’re dealing with it. By “dealing with it,” I mean that we’re inviting her friends to do stuff with us on the weekends now instead of putting a puzzle together or playing Mario Kart or watching Andi Mack.
Read MoreOnce upon a time, the US-45 Bypass was built to smooth traffic flow on what we all know and love as Highland Avenue. However, even upgrades need upgrades, and one needn’t be a native of Jackson to notice all the recent changes to the Bypass, particularly where it merges onto I-40 at Casey Jones Village.
Read More“Community is not something you have, like pizza,” wrote social critic James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere. “Nor is it something you can buy. It’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies—which is to say a local economy.” Americans, perhaps above all others, have bought into the lie in the last couple of generations that each person is an island, shaping her or his own destiny with nothing but a morning shot of caffeine and a solid WiFi connection.
Read MoreThere is a little Italian café in Geneva, Switzerland, that sits just across the street from the headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I found myself there one rainy morning in February hunched over coffee with a colleague. We ran through the updates of the people around us who were doing their best to keep their flags flying in the midst of deep decreases in global budgets and broad increases in needs for life-saving work in areas such as human rights and global health.
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