It’s known that there was a moment on move-in weekend in August 1994 when I turned from 21st Avenue onto Wedgewood Avenue in Hillsboro Village, and before turning onto 18th to my new apartment, looked past Belmont Mansion and suddenly had the premonition “I’m never going to know what’s on the other side of that hill.” And sure enough, when I left for the last time, it was under a cloud and with the Oxford-style consolation MA instead of the PhD I’d been accepted to earn. My career as I had known it was over. There was no idea what might be coming next.
But the thing I also remember is the end of that first year, May 1995. I remember hearing the Cranberries singing on Lightning 100 on my way down Blakemore. “Ode To My Family” was a different song before I was Irish, when my parents were both alive and I hadn’t been alienated from my relatives, before the blindside letter that summer that would be the warning shot for the future. It sounded like the end of the movie. Like I’d battled through and finally had that fifth year of college in a super-senior setting where I finally had what I’d dreamed of: friends, football, walkable campus with stuff to do, Internet access, a new city with new radio stations and new TV channels and new places to learn. In retrospect, it was the end of one movie, I just didn’t realize it.
And last weekend, for the first time since before I was in high school, I went to Nashville and didn’t set foot on campus once.
I was busy. I was spending time with the last blood family I have before they make the escape I wish I could. We went out to dinner like in days of yore: four adults in a cool place enjoying the comfort of company that knows its history together. We saw friends we rarely get to see. And I saw a city that is a funhouse mirror of what it was thirty years ago, one that steered hard into becoming Baptist Vegas and remade itself into the cultural capital of White America. Nashville was always a blue dot sort of town, but when your business is hospitality for the kind of people who think having to see brown people is woke, it’s hard to see it working out as a retirement option.
I never wanted to need a blue dot. I just wanted to be. There is another edit where I stay in Nashville, or Birmingham, or find myself in New Orleans or something, and have the crew of people around me that makes it possible to survive or even thrive. But everyone in high school moved away, and there was no one there in college or by the time I crashed out of Vandy, and as I’ve said so often of Birmingham, I didn’t have twenty years to wait.
I don’t know what happens next. The world is in far worse shape than it was in 1995, or 1997, or any of the other times in my life where I didn’t know what happens next. It’s impossible to think about a future further away than June right now, and retirement feels like it’s off the cards without moving somewhere else. And then where do you move where you don’t need a dot, or can find the people who can make you one at age 60 or worse?
The dream is being pared down to what is really important. We’re inching our way down Maslow’s pyramid. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but that’s the course we were put on 25 years ago by people who assumed things would just work out and the floor couldn’t collapse. Now when people say it’s going to be okay, I have two questions:
when? And how?