This was the shortest run through Birmingham in years. No Dreamland, not so much as a Chick-Fil-A nugget, and less than twenty waking hours spent in the presence of my relations. Instead, the feature piece of this excursion was dinner and lodging with a friend from the old days at Redneck Hogwarts.
Dinner was at Little Savannah, the sort of hole-in-the-wall establishment that has transformed the 205 from a nightmare realm of meat-and-three cafeterias and Waffle Houses into the sort of food destination that rates travel articles in the New York Times. The proprietor came out, shook our hands, asked where we were from, and I politely demurred when she extolled our mutual connection to my undergraduate institution. The cocktails, though, I will claim in a heartbeat – one specific concoction called “The Sound and the Fury” included housemade allspice syrup and a stout reduction made from boiling down a locally-made beer that legally couldn’t have existed ten years ago. And it was a cocktail I could have carried into Bourbon and Branch, or Clock Bar, or Alembic, or singlebarrel, or Scratch, and placed on the bar and said “Your move, boys.”
Lodging was at a grand old house pushing eighty or ninety years of age, with a commanding view of downtown and all the potential that goes along with a grand old empty house. My friend knew the history of the place, of the whole neighborhood, and it’s always interesting to remember that Birmingham existed before Bull Connor and his cronies made it famous for something other than steel. Indeed, the old streetcar system was one of the biggest in North America at one point, and there are plenty of neighborhoods with their origins in “streetcar suburbs” (which, ironically, are now all considered far too urban by today’s suburbanites).
There was also plenty of reminiscing about the old days at Redneck Hogwarts. It wasn’t just my own team – it seems that everyone from the delegates to French Convention to the math competition nerds to our own varsity Argonauts were all of one mind: we will not be thwarted by a bunch of rich white kids in pleated khakis and Bama bangs. We had kind of a chip on our shoulder – both from being the public school’s weirdo rejects and from the spectacle of a bunch of seg-academy kids thinking they could buy their way into being smart – and we essentially became the academic competition world’s Oakland Raiders. Or Miami Hurricanes, come to that. And we’re still proud of it – anyone who was there during the transition from the old setup to the new one in the late 1990s will tell you with certainly that Alma Mater jumped the shark at that precise point, and some of us are still wearing high school rings instead of college. Even if we have more than one to choose from.
Breakfast on the way out was at a place called Over Easy – yes, a breakfast joint, and one that sat within yards of where a typical Waffle House-style establishment once did. But the new place offers hash baskets – a poached egg as the lid on your hash-brown-basket of organic local sausage – and such curiosities as blue corn grits and locally roasted coffee.
It’s not the same city as it used to be. Not by a long shot. And dropped out of a clear blue sky from 1990, I would have been happy to carry on there. But I didn’t have twenty years to wait for the future to arrive – and when the chance came, I didn’t think once, let alone twice.