“All my life’s a circle
Sunrise and sundown
Moon rolls though the nighttime
’Til the daybreak comes around.”
—Quoted lyrics by Harry Chapin
OXFORD—It happens every time I come here, now. The initial sweet sense of nostalgia is rather quickly overcome by the not so sweet realization that this once sleepy little college town has aged a great deal better than have I.
Along with its more distinguished members, I returned to my alma mater last week for a meeting of the Mississippi Press Association’s board of directors. There were several of us Ole Miss grads, as well as State and Southern folks and at least one (gasp!) LSU alum who can be redeemed from that sin only by the fact that she is by far the prettiest and all round sweetest member of an otherwise motley crew of folks who gathered here under the auspices of trying to tend to the business of journalism in this state.
Both the university and the town which surrounds it are simply alive with vitality. The place is growing by leaps and bounds and there is an electric-like energy here which is practically tactile.
But that was not always the case. Far from it.
Come August, it will have been 47 years since I first stepped onto the campus of the University of Mississippi as a student. A sitting U.S. senator was also among that freshman class, as was the Delta’s lobbyist-in-chief and a who’s who of this state’s medical and legal professions. And it is almost impossible to overstate how much different the Ole Miss and Oxford that now exist are from those of yesteryear.
You had no problem finding a parking place, either in town or on campus in 1969; try to find one, now, especially either on or around The Square. There are bound to be at least 100 eateries in Oxford today, some of them downright hoity-toitie, with more opening up all the time. When I was going to school, there might have been a dozen, but I would be hard-pressed to name that many from memory.
Ole Miss has quite the reputation as a party school, and it was in my time, too, but we had to work a whole lot harder at it in those days. The one and only place that one could get (well, openly, anyhow) a drink was the Holiday Inn’s bar (if you smoozed the bartender) and you had to drive across the county line to get either a bottle or a beer—which is not to say, of course, that there were not plenty of frat houses and dorm rooms and car trunks slap dab full of bottles and beer.
Now it is quite the fad for kids to give themselves beer showers in the right field stands whenever a Rebel baseball player hits a home run and the Holiday Inn doesn’t even exist anymore, but has rather been replaced by a really neat new hotel (complete with roof top bar), themed entirely around “The Graduate” and bearing its name.
Some wit once observed that Ole Miss was “the school for the empty-headed sons of Delta planters and bankers,” and I think that was a lot more true in my time there than it is today. Now, on a casual stroll around campus, along with much newer and nicer buildings than before, one is struck by both the sheer, almost pastoral beauty of the place and what appear to be a far more serious and studious brand of bright-eyed, mainly smiling young men and women on their ways to and from classes.
And my goodness, those students are young. At one point I found myself mouthing, almost aloud, the rhetorical and thoughts of mortality-generating question: My Lord, was I ever that young?
And yes, of course, I was—going on a half-century ago. If you want to feel old, just try that one on for size.
There is a plaque in my office (red and blue, naturally), which reads: “Ole Miss in Oxford: A place that will  get in your blood and stay forever.” And the nostalgia tempered by melancholy inspired in me by my visits there now can simultaneously bring both the hint of a smile and a pang of something wistful to an old newspaperman of whom I reckon not much more should be expected.
“All my life’s a circle
But I can’t tell you why
Seasons spinning round again
The years keep rollin’ by.”
(Ray Mosby is publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork.)