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John R Adcox biography:
I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1956, and the small suburb of Allen Park was my storied kingdom for almost the first decade of my life. I am named after my grandfathers, two men I never knew—one died the year prior to my birth; the other died five months after my arrival in this world. I carry their names with me each day, but I know little about them, and the emptiness caused by their passing has weighed on my heart and mind through the years. My grandfather who died the year before my birth spoke to me, once, in a dream. I look forward to meeting my grandfathers face to face one day, and to hear their stories in their own voices.
In Allen Park, in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, my elementary school looms large in memory. Perhaps those early days at that school gave me the idea that I would enjoy being a teacher. And so, I planned to become a teacher.
As a young man, during a road trip just before beginning graduate studies, I had the pleasure of revisiting my old elementary school, and I was surprised at how much smaller the place had become in reality, so much smaller than that mythic realm I held in my mind. When I returned a few years later on another road trip, with my wife and son, I wanted to show them that magnificent shrine of my childhood . . . we drove around the block where I thought the school would be, but it was gone, the shadowed outline of the building on the grass in a municipal park whose sign carries the school’s name. I felt the loss of the building as the loss of a dear friend.
Traveling the road trip of my years, from Detroit, Michigan, to Jackson, Michigan, and on to Dallas, Texas (where I have resided for over half a century), “as the long train of ages glide away” (to quote William Cullen Bryant), the sense of change and loss and renewal permeates stories I have to tell. I have forever enjoyed reading. Stories make sense of life. Majoring in History and in English in college, earning a Master’s degree in English, I find stories fascinating, whether in prose, in verse, on the page or the stage or screen: story is king in my world.
“Nostalgic depression” is a term I have learned, perhaps even embraced. The etymology of nostalgia: from the Greek, “nostos”, (for “return” or “homecoming”), compounded with “algos” (for “sorrow” or “despair”). The Odyssey is all about “homesickness,” about the desire to return home. As with Odysseus, so too I suffer from a longing to return home. Often my stories are about the days of my youth, of places and faces I have known and fondly recall. No doubt others have their stories of earlier days that they cherish and retell. Stories are a way to recall and to relive glorious events of heroic days when we strode the earth like gods. In other ways, we shape and reshape with our stories the struggles, the losses, the sometimes overwhelming tragic irony of life, to make things right, somehow and somewhere, in imagination if nowhere else.
Stories of our past are vital. Yet I believe we have a longing for a more complete story, a completed story of a future home and a homecoming, something that is larger, grander, vaster, more perfect than the mind can imagine. Something Not Yet but certain to appear. Stories tell of our longing for the great Not Yet.
At least, that’s what I think. I hope “Eternal Moment on a Calm Palm Sunday Morning” captures that sense of longing and desire, for a world made better through the telling of the tale.
