Birney Imes: Watching eagles at Locafoma Lake

On a recent Saturday morning an intrepid group of nature enthusiasts gathered on a strip of pavement at the eastern edge of Locafoma Lake in the Noxubee Wildlife Refuge. They had braved wind and sub-freezing temps in hopes of seeing the Refuge’s resident eagles. They had not come in vain.

Birney Imes: All of a sudden you remember music

In William Saroyan’s short essay “Finlandia,” he writes of going into a music store in Helsinki and asking the girl working there if she knows “Finlandia,” the symphonic poem by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. Saroyan, then 27, had heard the piece five years earlier and had been haunted by it since. The girl finds the record and puts it on the turntable. She and the writer stand and listen to the music, both of them transfixed by its beauty. Afterward Saroyan asks the girl’s English-speaking coworker if she knows the composer. She does and gives him a phone number.

Birney Imes: Mary Williams at your service

We operate in a retail world dominated by chain stores. Too often these stores are staffed with lackadaisical clerks with little knowledge of the goods and services they are selling. In fact, so seldom do we encounter competence and enthusiasm in this arena, it is like a blast of cool, fresh air when we do. Here is one such story.

Birney Imes: Cats in the basement

About 10 years ago Dispatch pressmen Jerry Hayes and Jamie Morrison found a litter of kittens nestled between the walls in the basement. Hayes, now retired, and Morrison worked in the dark, cavernous space that houses our Goss Urbanite printing press.

Birney Imes: Jerry Rice comes home

Sometime in the spring of 1986 the town of Crawford threw a party for one of its native sons, Jerry Rice. After a dazzling college career as a wide receiver at tiny Mississippi Valley State University, Rice had been drafted first round by the San Francisco 49ers.

Jerry Rice Appreciation Day was a decidedly homespun affair. There was a parade featuring two Cadillacs. One of them, a salmon-colored convertible, had a front tag proclaiming, “My Other Car is a Cadillac.” The event culminated at an unkempt park. A troupe of break-dancers in red sateen outfits performed some impressive acrobatics on flattened refrigerator boxes and then a few people made speeches.

Birney Imes: Photograph offers bridge to history

On a winter morning sometime in the late 1920s — probably 1927 — photographer O.N. Pruitt unpacked a heavy wooden tripod and planted it in the mud on the west bank of the Tombigbee.

Birney Imes: Fortunes and Crispins and Macintoshes, too

A little more than a week ago my brother Stephen and I stood on a hilltop in central New York eating apples. We were lost in a maze of apple trees — and, frankly, astonished; each tree was laden with more fruit than seemed possible. Endless rows of them, each with their own little street sign: Honeycrisp, Macintosh, Macoun, Empire, Northern Spy and so on.

Seen and Heard: Barbour: ‘I’ve had my last government job’

After holding forth on the merits of Mississippi Power’s Kemper County power plant under construction, Former Gov. Haley Barbour was asked at the Starkville Rotary

Birney Imes: Lynn Spruill’s journey

Lynn Spruill grew up in Starkville, the only child of an accountant whose energy level and curiosity exceeded the demands of his practice. L.E. Spruill, the son of a Kolola Springs farmer (his only sibling is the wonderful Frances Jutman of Columbus), also bought, demolished and rebuilt failing subdivisions and rental properties. He did dirt work.

Birney Imes: Reunion under the old bridge

Fifty years ago when they were young and beautiful and gas was 35 cents a gallon, they drove their cars across the river bridge to a battered little drive-in with a gravel parking lot. The place was a staging ground for the rituals of their youth: dating, hanging out, racing their father’s car down Old Macon Road.

Birney Imes: The man who can sharpen anything (almost)

On a Saturday morning this past winter Elbert Ellis, Casey Griffin and I were planting pine seedlings along the edge of a muddy field in Noxubee County. As we were slogging along — there’s nothing quite like Prairie mud — Scott Boyd, publisher of the Macon Beacon pulled up. The newspaperman was on his way to have some tools sharpened by a Mennonite man on Buggs Ferry Road; I didn’t catch the name.

Birney Imes: Going down to Rosedale

ROSEDALE (Saturday, Aug. 17) — The early morning sunlight has turned the glass of the streets broken beer bottles into sparkling gemstones. The alchemists responsible for these riches have abdicated, at least for now, leaving the dogs and cats to rule a two-block stretch of bombed-out juke joints and defunct storefronts otherwise known as Bruce Street.

Birney Imes: Hersh, Big Jim and Tuffy

During the winter Coach Brewer had his football players — the ones who weren’t playing basketball — lifting weights, wrestling and playing handball. Our “handball courts” were defined by strips of masking tape on the gym floor. We would swat a racquetball against the concrete block walls of the gym. Good for eye-hand coordination and quickness, he told us. Most of the time, though, we goofed off.

Birney Imes: Conversation with a young sailor

Nine months and 1,100 miles ago, 18-year-old Alexandre Ledwith climbed into his $500 sailboat moored on the banks of the Mississippi at Trempealeau, Wis., and headed downstream.

Birney Imes: A Sunday evening on the Champs-Elysees

Paris, July 21 — Everyone said the crowds would be horrendous. The woman at the front desk was unenthusiastic. Six cyclists from California who were drinking wine in the lobby of the hotel had been to the Champs-Elysees earlier in the day. They had seen the crowds and the giant flag draped from the Arc de Triomphe, and that was good enough for them. They would watch the finish on TV.

Birney Imes: A ride to the train station with Tony

Tony had said he would give me a ride to the train station.

Partial to Home: Pictures from an exhibition

Thirty-five years ago this month Blewett Thomas invited me to ride over to Tuscaloosa, Ala., to visit the bluesman Johnny Shines. The day before Blewett had met Axel Kustner, a German blues enthusiast, who was visiting their mutual friend, Big Joe Williams in Crawford.

Birney Imes: Marty Turner’s next big thing

Marty Turner has packed in a lot of experience into his 35 years. Judging from the variety of his exploits, the recently elected Ward 4 Councilman is nothing if not adaptable. Let’s hope so. Come July 1, Turner will be one of six men charged with running the city of Columbus (along with Mayor Robert Smith).

Birney Imes: Alfred Walker’s century plant puts on a show

Saturday morning Wendell Rinehart and Alfred Walker were shooting the breeze in the den of Walker’s ranch-style home on Martin Luther King Drive. Man cave might be a more apt description of the room, which sports a bar, shag carpet and a large glass table laden with glossy sports magazines. The wall-mounted TV was tuned to an ESPN NFL preview.

Birney Imes: Farmers’ market ramble

Had you been at the Hitching Lot Farmers Market Saturday morning you might have seen a young woman in a long, hot pink skirt carrying a small pig. Not to be outdone, the pig had a bright pink halter and matching leash.