Dear Classmate,

It was wholly a pleasure to hear from another member of the Class of ‘58 at the University of Missouri. It’s another advantage of writing a newspaper column, hearing from old friends who recognize the name in the paper and decide to make contact after all these years. Though it can be a disadvantage, too, depending on the classmate.

Like you, I’d love to go back, but of course we can’t – not to the manageable state university of maybe 10,000 students and the little college town we knew. The history faculty, loaded with luminaries, was only slightly larger than the number of history graduate students enrolled. Talk about individual attention, even tender care. Are there any universities like that left?

This side of time travel, there’s no going back to that Columbia, Mo. The current imposter going under that name is a good-sized city. To quote the cry of anyone who ever knew and loved a small town he’d left: How dare they make all those changes without consulting us!

The town we knew was especially nice on crisp fall days when everybody else was yelling for the Tigers at Memorial Stadium while I, no fan of football and even less of crowds, could stroll the suddenly empty streets with no company but my thoughts and God, who usually maintained a charitable silence.

Although not quite. He might arrange a sign of His presence here and there, or what Walker Percy calls a clue: a driven leaf, a ragged transient, a certain slant of light. Or a Bible might be left open at Hillel House to a particularly haunting passage, as if by chance. His traps were laid everywhere. Or as C.S. Lewis notes, “a young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist, can not be too careful of his reading. … God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

And malt does more than Milton can, as the poet says, to justify God’s ways to man. Even better than those brilliant fall afternoons before the first snowfall was the end of exam week the first week of summer, when I’d graded my last blue book as a graduate assistant, turned it in, and was free to walk around an empty downtown. I might even stop at the little bar next to the Daniel Boone Hotel for what seemed like the biggest schooner of beer I’d ever seen. I get thirsty just remembering it.

But, to coin a phrase, you can’t go home again. Or to university again. A word from an old classmate may be closest thing to getting back. Thank you.

I had no idea before your e-mail arrived out of the wild blue ether that you were a liberal. You always seemed so practical.

You want to know how I, a “former Louisiana native,” can still be for offshore drilling after the disaster in the Gulf. Putting aside the question of whether anyone can be a former native – of anywhere – the answer to your question is: Easy. The same way you might still be for air travel after the fate that befell the Hindenburg, or tolerate skyscrapers after the Twin Towers were brought down.

Things will go wrong, even on a massive scale. That’s not a good enough reason to shut down Louisiana’s – and the Gulf’s – oil industry. In addition to what’s been done to its fishing and tourism. What has befallen the Gulf is an argument for better technology and stricter regulation, not for destroying still another vital part of Louisiana’s, and the country’s, economy.

There will always be those who believe no crisis should go to waste – not when they can employ it as a cover for doing what they wanted to do all along. And there’s nothing like a catastrophe and its consequent panic to encourage draconian decrees. For example, No More Drilling Offshore!

Ah, but the oil industry is heavily subsidized by the government, you say you’ve learned from a story in the New York Times. This is news? You bet it’s dependent on government – licenses and depletion allowances and such. But so is much of the American economy. From agriculture to automobiles to housing to finance to the new “green” industries that need start-up money from Washington. Even a free press depends on government’s subsidizing its postage rates.

The oil industry is scarcely an exception; it’s more the rule in this mixed economy, which is getting less mixed and more a branch of government all the time. That’s a lot more worrisome than letting producing wells in the Gulf produce.

You say you don’t remember my having a Southern accent and wonder if I’ve got one now. I do indeed, and keep it hanging in my closet for ceremonial occasions – right next to the seersucker suits and straw hats.

Any sharp linguist would probably place my accent within a hundred miles of the piney woods – and oilfields – of East Texas. And all them old cotton fields back home. To wit, Shreveport, La., which is only in Louisiana by geographical accident. It’s really the capital of its own Rhode Island-sized statelet, the ArkLaTex.

But growing up in the Age of Radio, my East Texas vernacular was layered over by the influence and enunciation of newscasters like Robert Trout, who set the standard for diction, and the nicotine-stained rhythms of Edward R. Murrow. (“This is London …”) Growing up in a Yiddish-speaking household might have had an effect, too. Go figure.

I’m glad to hear you’ve settled in Chicago and like it. So do I, having spent a year there writing editorials for the old Chicago Daily News. Ah, Lake Michigan. The Gold Coast and the Magnificent Mile. Maxwell Street and pastrami-on-rye. The architecture: Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. And the free concerts – jazz and classical – in the park. Taking the train, complete with picnic basket, to the Ravinia music festival in the good old summertime. And on State Street, that great street/ I just wanna say/ They do things/ They don’t do on Broadway….

Keep enjoying that toddlin’ town,

Inky Wretch

© 2010 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.