Affirmation

Firstkid came in last night from college, a doctor's appointment today the reason. I cooked some of his favorite food last night, and he made a comment about how there was not cooking like that down at university. He seemed happy and engaged in his studies, he's making friends, he's proven that he is getting more and more self-sufficient, and, later, he referred to going back down to Knoxville as heading "home" and then caught himself and made sure we understood that our house is still his "home," too.

Restless

Last night, I watched Michael Cody, a colleague in the ETSU Department of Literature & Language, give a solo acoustic concert in a coffee shop in neighboring Kingsport, Tennessee. He played a mix of his original songs ("Genesis Road," "In the Jaws of Modern Romance," and a song I think he titled "There's Always a Train") and some cover material, notably Bruce Springsteen's "Gypsy Biker" and Golden Earring's "Radar Love" (the latter without the extended instrumental break). He cannot stand still when he performs, he has a surprising range as a vocalist, and he has a canny ability to put together a set list. He was happy and comfortable, and everyone had a good time.

. . . except the evening made me restless. During performances I have to endure one of two kinds of restlessness. The bad one has to do with my yearning for the ordeal to end. The other kind, the kind I suffered last night, was the urge to start making something. I was listening to Michael, but I was also watching his left hand to figure out chord progressions. It was all I could do, when I got home, to keep from grabbing a guitar and working out how he had played some of the songs. That is always a positive experience; it comes from readings and workshops, from particularly successful classes, from conversations with friends over shared interests; a lot of my best work comes from this restlessness.

Michael made me restless. He performed songs, and he sometimes performed them as if there were no one there to watch him, lost in the pleasure of playing, making self-deprecating acknowledgment when he came back to us in the audience. It was in no way a selfishness on his part, because he erased himself in a way, giving himself completely to the performance and making himself his own instrument. It was a pleasure to see his happiness to perform.

You can enjoy his studio-recorded performance of his original song, "Homecoming," here, and you can feel some of that restlessness, too.

Walking to Work

Some mornings, particularly on days when a car is in the shop, I walk to work and then make adjustments to my schedule accordingly. Since I tend to be an early riser, fairly often I get started before the sun rises, and I have learned which of the neighborhood dogs mind their own business, where the walnuts will be on the sidewalk when I might miss seeing them, and even, lately, some of the disturbing names people assign their wifi networks between my home and my job. I get about an hour of thinking in, writing rough drafts of material in my mind, figuring out how to handle a particularly thorny meeting, planning new projects, and hoping to see or hear something that provides just a moment of taking me out of the everyday routine.

This morning, as I was crossing the railroad tracks near old downtown Johnson City, I saw the relatively flat land between me and East Tennessee State University, and it occurred to me that the gritty feel of the dirt was of about the same consistency of the sandy soil in my hometown, Cullman, and in Tuscaloosa, and the traces along some of the highways in eastern North and South Carolina, and northern Georgia, too. It was just a flash of recognition, and then I was thinking about an experience as a boy, when a ball rolled into the weathered clapboard garage on my family's lot, and how I ducked into it to grab the ball, stood up, and saw that I had ducked under an orb web bigger around than I could reach. There, in the center, was what appeared to me to be the biggest spider I had ever seen. It did not move as I ducked back under the web and scooted away from the garage.

Only the sound of the gravel and gritty dirt, like the driveway in our backyard, prompted that memory.

"But don't the trees seem nice and full?"

I wish I could take credit for that line, but it came from an e-mail my brother down in Tuscaloosa sent me this morning. Just as we here in East Tennessee have been adjusting to our oldest's moving away to college, my brother and his wife have been adjusting to their youngest's moving to college.

The line above is from an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, "Opie the Birdman." The episode starts with Opie's killing a mother bird with his new slingshot and his taking on the responsibility of raising her three young. The birds mature in the course of the episode, and Opie does, too. It is a hard thing for him to release the birds once they are able to fend for themselves, and he tells his father, Andy, that the cage seems "empty." In his wisdom, Andy replies, "But don't the trees seem nice and full?" Andy feels awfully proud that Opie has taken on those responsibilities, but as viewers we can tell that he is steeling himself for the time when Opie will move out to be on his own.

My brother and his family have had a lot of life-changing experiences down in Tuscaloosa this year, a devastating tornado, loss of friends, new jobs, blessed opportunities, growing relationships, and all sorts of trials of resilience.

Sometimes the promise of a tree full of birdsong helps to keep perspective.

That Business about Leaving Pieces of One's Heart

In August 1996, with the assistance of family, I dug every lodged piece of heart out of Knoxville I could think of, only to plant a big piece back in it just a few days ago.

These conversations keep arising at work. One of our newer professors has one daughter, and, when he sees how I am weathering firstkid's moving to college, he starts thinking about how he and his wife will feel when their daughter leaves for school. "You have two more kids at home," he said today, a bit wistfully, and I didn't tell him that they are feeling different feelings, too, the way the house is different, the curiosity of how firstkid will change, the anticipation of their times to leave, too. I haven't told the other two kids about these things, like the surprise of how my wife and I will suddenly seem to have aged a bit, even when they are gone only a couple of weeks, how small but comfortable the house will seem when they first get back, but how cramped it will be by the end of summer vacation, how much we will ache when they move to a home of their own and they cannot decide what all to take and what to leave behind. I could tell them, but they won't remember it when they need it, and I am not sure I could convey to them just what it feels like to get that independence and to feel the two-purposed tug of the family tie, a bond one sometimes strains against, a tether someone often relies upon.

About my friend's comment, though, yes, I am grateful that there are two more kids at home, yes, I dread the coming high school tensions that are going to happen, yes, I want them to have every chance firstkid has, but, no, I am not going to console myself that it will be any easier. I will appear a bit more stoic, I think, but I doubt that familiarity will make this experience blunter or duller.

It did feel kind of funny to text this message to firstkid, though: "Text your mom."

"I'm running down the road, tryin' to loosen my load . . ."

Yesterday, our family took firstkid to live in Knoxville, where he begins
life as a University of Tennessee student on Wednesday. I am convinced that the difficulty of moving has the function of diluting the disorientation of
starting anew with the relief of a completed task. I am proud and excited
for him, and I miss him, and the house did feel emptier when we returned
without him last night. I do not know how long it will be before the house
feels "usual" in its new way.

On the way back from Knoxville, my wife put in an Eagles mix CD, and there
it was, "Take It Easy," one of the songs that defined freedom when
released just before school let out for summer 1972. Written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey (Browne recorded it for his For Everyman album the
next year), "Take It Easy" crackles with sunny possibility,
wide-ranging good feeling, and some lines I have not considered enough lately:

Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you
crazy--
Lighten up while you still can,
Don't even try to understand,
Just find a place to make your stand, and take it
easy.

It occurs to me, I was two months from being a teenager when that song came out, and that philosophy made sense then. Now, I hear my own wheels, and I struggle to understand, but for about three minutes, this song offers respite. I hope firstkid has his own “Take It Easy,” and I hope, by chance, that I will hear it, too, when I need it. Life has worked out where I no longer dream of “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” and I am proud to watch him work his out as well.

Steve Earle Is Right

In "Hometown Blues" on his Train a Comin' album (1997), Steve Earle sings, "'Home is where the heart is,' ain't that what they always say? / My heart lies in broken pieces scattered along the way." When I first heard these lyrics, I did not understand them the way I understand them now. Before, I thought the lines had to do with a series of disappointments, that the speaker has gone from one heartbreak to another. In the past few years, I have gained a different perspective. It occurs to me now that every place one has loved is home, and everywhere a loved one lives is home, so that over the course of our experiences, we wind up leaving pieces of our hearts in many places. They may be "scattered," because we never know just when or how a person or place or experience might affect us. After all, "scatter" does not always have a negative connotation. We think of casting seeds, and we have all heard the fairy tales of leaving a breadcrumb trail.

2011 has brought me back to this idea time and again, as I watch the older members of my family age, as my older son prepares to go away to university, as my younger children enter adolescence, as two of my nieces have married this year with yet another newly engaged, as my younger colleagues have new babies in their families, as my two hometowns, Cullman and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, have suffered devastation from tornadoes, as I wrestle with my knowledge that all kinds of change must occur and that there would never be any one moment perfect enough to fix as the permanent moment, that the hope and satisfaction of creating, serving, and loving free us from the stasis of perpetual mourning.

As the title character of Tennyson's "Ulysses" states, "I am a part of all that I have met." Ulysses asserts in this line that he has affected every circumstance in which he has been involved, and he has created a legacy across all those interactions. At the same time, however, we acknowledge as readers that all those experiences and relationships have created Ulysses in aggregate, that like all of us Ulysses is a patchwork creature whose idea of self relies on orientation to others.

Scattered yet integral, cast and rooted, broken but feeling in a broad swath from Tuscaloosa to Johnson City, my heart has to grow bigger and more resilient as I exchange pieces from place to place. I have to be grateful that it remains tender with each new break.

White's Grocery in August

Just a quick note today, as the heat seems to have ebbed a bit--

When I was a boy, there were small grocery stores in my neighborhood, more like tiendas one now sees in my hometown than like convenience stores. About two blocks away in opposite directions from our house, there were two. Mann's Grocery was about the size of a two-car garage, and, in fact, the new owners of the house to which it is still attached have converted it into a garage. It was always dark inside there, and it smelled of must and its oily concrete slab of a floor. I do not remember much more about it except that the old woman who ran it had unfortunate hennaed hair that frizzed out from the sides like a weathered Bozo wig. Mrs. Mann had been unkind to my mother a number of times, and I did not frequent that store.

Mr. Perry White (yes, the same name as the editor for The Daily Planet--there was a man named "Donald Duck" in my hometown, too) ran the other store, which was more the size of a convenience store, and it, too, still stands today, but new owners have consciously made it into a convenience store. When I went there, it was more like a full-fledged grocery. Mr. White even butchered meat there, I remember, and Mom bought the great majority of our groceries there, well before our town got its first full-fledged supermarkets. Almost all the change I could scrounge went to that store. He sold small bundles of "stripped" comic books--an illegal, bootleg practice ("stripped" comic books have their covers removed; retailers were supposed to return covers to distributors to get credit for unsold copies, and they were to destroy the remaining comics, because the comics were worth less than the cost of returning them). I bought a lot of penny candy there, learning to make modest purchases to avoid the sales tax that would kick in at eight cents. Before I outgrew the store, just as my neighborhood eventually did, I loved to buy bottled soft drinks from Mr. White.

My parents were teenagers in the 1950s, and they drank Coca-Cola--I cannot remember that Mom ever brought home any other soft drink. On occasion, I would get a soft drink in Mr. White's store, though. He had a large, horizontal cooler, about the size of a huge chest freezer, along the front wall of his store. While it had lids on it--heavy, metal lids with black plastic handles, hinges in the middle, and black rubber stripping on the sides--the lids were rarely closed, because they did not have to be. Open on the top, that big, red cooler kept water icy cold all day without a single drop condensing on the white Coca-Cola logo embossed on its front. The cooler would contain all kinds of soft drinks: Royal Crown cola, Nehi fruit-flavored sodas (peach Nehi--I haven't seen one of those for decades), Sun-Drop citrus sodas, and Coca-Cola. A kid my size would have to lean over the cooler and stick an arm down into the icy water, fishing around for the best available flavor, and would ache to the elbow with the fun shock of the cold. White's was a shady store, not dark like Mann's, and it did not smell musty, and he was happy to see us. The lady who worked for him, Mrs. Flannigan, was patient when I made one seven-cent purchase and then one six-cent purchase. They didn't care if a kid brought in a dirty bottle instead of paying deposit.

Cold water and clean concrete, dripping before jumping back into the elementary school pool, laughing while Dad sprayed my brother and me with a hose beside the neighbor's cinder block garage, standing tiptoe and barefoot while fishing for a peach Nehi in White's Grocery--the clinical display of today's upright fluorescent soft drink coolers offers none of small respite of mystery and adventure of a scavenged cold drink during a hot Alabama summer in the mid 1960s.

Please forgive the nostalgia.

Springsteen and Empty Streets

I was driving to work this morning at about 5:15, hoping to get a jump on the workday, enjoying temperatures at 70 degrees instead of the 90+ we will have later, and listening to Bruce Springsteen's Magic (2007). I realized this morning that Springsteen to me is what Roy Rogers has been for my father, in that both embody a type of American ideal, somewhat romantic and principled, rooted in the same traditions of aspirations, yearning for freedom, willing to fulfill duty, thinking of legacy. This morning, the moist air was cool enough not to be oppressive, and rolling the windows down in my truck let me feel the fresh day before it got fully started. Then the track "Gypsy Biker" started, and the theme of being sold out by the Powers That Be had so much resonance with our current political ordeal that the song shook me again. Just as Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) has helped to shape this path of American Romanticism, Born in the USA (1984) defines the Reagan Era in its contrasting American hope ("No Retreat, No Surrender") with deteriorating American standards (the title track), and The Rising (2002) gives us a much-needed, cathartic 9-11 requiem, Magic evaluates the George W. Bush administration time and again; these songs still apply to the legacy of that administration, as the darkness creeps from the edge of town, deeper and deeper into our neighborhoods, our neglected parks, our underfunded schools, our crumbling infrastructure, and our distracted and frightened electorate.