The River

Yesterday, we drove up from Dunwoody to Clinton to participate in a tailgate party with Kate, her roommates, their friends, assorted boyfriends and parents. It turned out the Ranns were there from Griffin, visiting Sara Beth, and we really got to know them for the first time in four years of school in common for our daughters. Kate's roommate, Beth, had her parents down from Johnson City, which is a somewhat odd place for people who are from New York, Chicago, Atlanta and other places to settle down. Alli's dad, Don, and his girlfriend were there and he was grilling hot dogs and hamburgers for the crowd. He really knows how to set up a tailgate party. It was quite pleasant and really fine because of the opportunity to sit down with all of these folks and talk about everything. Sara Beth had good taste in Bourbon, Maker's Mark and Hal Rann offered me a beer.

I had a nice time with the boys from SNU, who were hanging around the girls and their parents like hound dogs on the front porch, and got invited to a fraternity party which Kate really didn't want us to attend. I think there was a little bit of territorialism going on, Kate protecting her turf. That was ok. Instead, we ate seafood and got back in the car to Griffin, after picking up the dog and going to Walmart.

Kate has been kind enough to allow us to participate in the culture of her life in college to an extent which is rather surprising. I am now listening to a story on NPR about the Clash, which was part of my college culture in the late 70's, early 80's and I suppose that we have allowed Kate to participate vicariously in our college culture as well. We get along pretty well and the time-separated cultures we come from are not that different in the long run.

I have been surprised how resilient institutions and culture are, considering the complexity and differences and the ever-evolving technologies. Back when Cindy and I were first married, we saw a movie called Mystery Train, that starred Joe Strummer, vocalist and leader of the Clash. The movie involved several people finding themselves in Memphis in the early 80's basically trying to take on the image of Elvis Presley and the feel of Memphis. In the movie, they intersect, interconnect and escape from the aura of Memphis and Elvis in the end.

I think that this shows how resilient and worthy certain elements of our culture are, that the icons of my college times could be caught up in the icons of my birth and early childhood and that these could be passed on to the next generation seamlessly.

We all individuate and try to find our voices, but we also carry the baggage of our families and experiences and our cultures and who we are collectively. The odd thing is the reality behind these images. I remember knowing growing up that Nashville was more than just country music and the Grand Old Opry. Quite a lot more. I know Memphis is more than Elvis. Our lives are more than the images we posit. And they are more connected than we think.

I am Elvis gyrating on Ed Sullivan. I am four mop-haired boys from Liverpool singing and playing on the same stage several years later to the screams of millions. I am walking around in a daze inspecting missiles in the Summer grass on a tour of Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. I am wandering around the IBM offices in Indianapolis and Huntsville and Atlanta, trying to figure out how it all works together, three rooms full of computer. I am eating barbecue with corncakes in the Pic-a-rib restaurant across from the old wooden Clarksville, Tennessee railroad station. I am catching a L&N train from the Queen Anne station in darkness of a night in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. I am sitting on a blanket in the infield watching the lipstick tube cars with Offenhauser engines, screaming around the track in Indianapolis, Indiana. I am running down the field with a junior-sized football at Murphy Candler Park in the Fall sunshine. I am eating sandwiches at Lum's restaurant in my cleats and uniform, the smell of line chalk and bermuda grass, running around with my friends and teammates and siblings, like the nuisances we are, while our parents drink beer and laugh and enjoy the opportunity to act like adults having fun together. I am walking off the football field after a loss at Clark Central High School, holding the hand of a little African-American boy from Athens, who is offering me his brand of hero worship. I am doing the same in Georgetown, Virginia, on the campus of Georgetown University, leaving the sight of my last football game as a participant. I am staring with wonder at a little female baby in the nursery window of Piedmont Hospital and combing her hair to get her ready for school. I am making a sandwich for her lunch and leaving the paper on the cheese, as an unintended surprise. I am driving a beat up old Volkswagen Jetta to school, singing with my daughter because the radio doesn't work. I am walking through the wet and cold of the French Quarter in New Orleans with someone I maybe barely knew from years past but now is completing my thoughts and sentences, and vica versa. I am waiting nervously at the front of a Methodist church in Irvine, California and trying to catch her eye as she stares at the floor and tries to navigate the walk down the aisle toward me. I am throwing my portly catcher's body toward a foul ball in the late Spring dust on the Dundee Park infield in Griffin. I am speaking a sermon based on the events of my life and the changes I have seen in forty years of life to the congregation of First Presbyterian Church, Griffin. I am looking forward to a hearing tomorrow and driving around the state of Georgia, selling the homes of those who can not make the necessary payments. I am trying to keep the payments of our house current to escape the call of the foreclosure sale. I am catching the Allman Brothers in concert in Roanoke, Virginia and hearing the sounds of REM coming from the second floor nightclub above me as I walk through downtown Athens, Georgia. I stare at the familiar, but blank faces of my dead grandmothers at their funerals in the dead of Winter, both times, and wondering at a little wooden box carefully placed in a small marble crypt in New Orleans. I am JFK in Dallas and RFK in Los Angeles and MLK in Memphis. I am two planes flying deliberately from Logan Airport and sailing incomprehensively into the twin towers in New York, while I watch in the semi-darkness of a morning on the bayou in Bayou Lacombe. One plane from Logan Airport in Boston is winging me to Heathrow Airport, where a tube trip into town leaves me with the feeling that I am very, very far away from who I was and what I know and those who love me.

Distinct but very similar, the flow of life in America in the latter part of the Twentieth Century through the beginning of the Twenty First.