Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.

On my first day of school in Mississippi, a boy pinned me to the ground and made me eat dirt. I was a California kid dropped into the Deep South in the 1980s and learned quickly that I didn’t belong. That moment set the tone for the rest of my years there.

My family was multiracial. My sister had been adopted from Korea. Back home, that didn’t raise eyebrows. In Mississippi, people would ask where we “got” her, as if she were something that came with a label. I saw people living in tarpaper shacks just down the road from our home in Madison.

Even as a kid I could feel something settled in the ground and in the air. A weight. A history. A tension that told me everything I needed to know without anyone saying it out loud. I understood early that the place was not built for someone like me.

When I finally left after seventh grade, I made myself a promise: I would never set foot in Mississippi again. And for almost 40 years, I’ve kept that promise. I planned my life around avoiding the state, even once choosing to vacation in Europe so I wouldn’t have to attend a company retreat in Biloxi. Mississippi was a closed chapter. A place I ran from and never looked back.

Then came Lane Kiffin.

The irony is obvious. I grew up in a UCLA and San Francisco 49ers household. Lane Kiffin is USC and the Raiders. He survived getting fired on an airport tarmac while coaching the University of Southern California football team. He survived Raiders owner Al Davis publicly dressing him down like he had no business holding a headset.

Yet, he looks calmer in Oxford than anywhere he has ever been. Maybe he has found his elusive peace in Mississippi. And I respect that deeply. Peace was not something Mississippi ever offered me.

Kiffin and I are opposites, but we share one thing. We have lived like vagabonds. Always on the move. Always trying to outrun something. For him, it was pressure, expectations and the shadow of his own potential. For me, it was a childhood I wanted to forget and a place I refused to return to. Mississippi wasn’t my place, but maybe it’s his. And there is something admirable about seeing a man find a home in the last place anyone expected.

He has made me rethink things I didn’t think were up for reconsideration. I find myself rooting for him to stay, and in a strange way, rooting for the people of Mississippi to win this one. LSU and Florida can circle all they want. I hope he stays right where he is.

I’m not saying I’m ready to book a ticket back or retrace the streets of my childhood. But I can say that I no longer feel the hard line I once drew. Mississippi will probably never be my place, but I can appreciate that it has become someone else’s. And in watching Lane Kiffin settle into the life he has built there, I’ve felt something I never expected.

A softening. A shift. A recognition that even the places we leave can still hold something worthwhile.

So, yes, I’m rooting for him to stay. I’m rooting for Ole Miss to keep its coach. And for the first time in my life, I’m rooting for Mississippi, too.

Lance J. Mayhew is a published author who writes about food, wine, travel and spirits. He runs a celebrity-backed gin distillery, appears regularly on Portland’s top-rated morning drive radio show and serves as honorary consul for the Republic of Namibia. He lived in Mississippi during the 1980s before building his career in the Pacific Northwest.