Earlier this year Andrea and I attended a birthday party for one of our longtime friends. It was mostly Andrea's crowd, but we eventually merged into a conversation circle of faces familiar to me.
Everyone was discussing growing up in their hometown and the nostalgia they felt for it. I was seated next to the birthday girl's mother, and she turned to me, "So, where did you grow up?" I straightened up a bit, and a smile crossed my face.
"I'm from Long Beach, Mississippi." Another friend in the same circle chuckled.
"Wow! Did you hear the pride in his voice?" She wasn't wrong. Growing up in Coastal Mississipi was a whole different experience from growing up in other parts of the Magnolia state. I'd like to think the mix of palms, pines, and oaks, proximity to sand and water, and the permeating brine in the air just got into your bones, gifting us with a diverging outlook from the rest of the state. I'm not sure my childhood would have been as idyllic as I remember if I'd grown up north of Hattiesburg.
These days I find myself getting my coastal fix in unusual ways. Phone calls from Mom keep me apprised of family friends still in the area along with the latest spate of business and restaurants attempting to get a foothold. I've found social media is a two-edged sword. My buddy Mike sent a video he shot while on one of his work runs. There was a tropical storm over in Louisiana, but the beaches along Highway 90 were wholly unaffected. He described the scene in the 30-second clip, "It's beautiful out here with the whitecaps in the golden sunshine and the sea oats blowing in the wind." While it's great to see what my coastal tribe is doing, it's a major drag being a good 20-hour drive away. Perhaps most unusually, I discovered a live cam from the Biloxi lighthouse that I'll have streaming on a monitor in my office. Watching the stop and go of Highway 90 traffic and the progress of a summer squall rolling through is utterly mesmerizing.
Andrea and I caught Anthony Rosano and the Conqueroos as they opened for Bob Seger when he played a nearby venue. It was a great set, and one song in particular reminded me of the conversation at our friend's birthday party. My periodic bouts of wistful yearning for the coastal life of youth are not unique to me, and we're all susceptible to waves of nostalgia about our hometowns. The Conqueroos sate these spells by touring the southeast with their brand of blues and rock. Based in coastal Virginia, they get it. Their song, "Long Island Sound" references a body of water much further north that featured prominently in their formative years as Mississippi's Gulf Coast did for mine.
In many ways, the youthful escapades from the song mirrored my own. Hot rod cars, summer nights under street lights, and kicking off our shoes at the beach is common ground. Like them, no matter where they go, the coastal place of my youth will always be a part of me and the place I call home.
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