The prodigal returns

I’m fifteen years late.

Had fate been different, I would have returned to Dudley Field in September of 1997 for an easy win over Texas Christian.  Or maybe for the Alabama loss.  Instead, I heard the bulk of the Alabama game on the radio and the rest at my uncle’s apartment on ESPN, because I was en route to Arlington to start the next phase of my life.  Somewhere in Chattanooga, I absent-mindedly put my window down for a second, and my Vanderbilt flag went hurtling onto the interstate behind me, never to be seen again.  And the Tide shut out the Dores, 20-0.

Life has a way of being ham-fisted in its symbolism sometimes.

The transformation was rapid and it was complete – and it was disorienting. Now I could follow the Redskins as closely as I’d ever followed the Tide or the Commodores – and easily following my college teams was out of the question.  Riding around listening to a game would mean Sundays.  And there’s very little national run for a team that wins two games a year…so Vanderbilt had to go.  It was Widenhofer, it was VBK, and it was an age of darkness for the black and gold, and I’d just flunked out.  No more homework. No more looming exams judging my future. No prospect for literally writing a book, for making the obligatory original contribution to the literature.  No immortality for my forecasts about the Southernization of American politics.

More to the point: no more late nights in the Overcup Oak, with milkshakes made with three shots of espresso and the grounds dumped right in.  No more steak fajitas and Rolling Rock on the patio at SATCO. No Monday Night Football at the Villager with one of Henry’s po-boys, no more drive-thru McDonalds en route to squatting awkwardly behind the plate at an intramural softball game, no more wandering through the Opryland Hotel in an attempt to clear my mind and escape the growing reality around me.  

And crucially, no more psychopath lurking in Birmingham, keeping me ensnared with guilt and obligation and fear.

It was a pretty clean break, for better or worse.  I would come back to get my diploma (and see my dad for the last time, as it turns out) and get my hair cut by Cheri at Salon FX one last time, but after that, I don’t think I returned to Nashville for five and a half years.  When I did, it was as a thirty year old, established in my new career (and quite successfully) and in the company of my fiancee (in everything but name).  A completely different person walked around campus on that trip, one who was born in DC and forged in a completely different fire, and I felt more awkward than ever about claiming the legacy of the school whose ring sat on my finger as an exercise in advanced degree-laundering and self-validation.

Three years later, over a prolonged weekend and in the wake of some serious nonsense at my undergraduate school, I had a long drawn-out think about who I could legitimately claim and the extent to which I could truly think of myself as a Vanderbilt alumnus.  And I got there in my mind, somehow, and decided that I would embrace it.  Which meant another trip up to buy some more gear, eat at SATCO, and walk around some nine years later convincing myself that it was real, that it actually happened.

That was six years ago.  Only now am I getting back to Nashville. In the meantime, we’ve turned into a top-25 program in many sports, won several conference titles, and I have over four hundred Twitter followers willing to testify to the fact that yes, I am a Vanderbilt man through and through.  And I guess I am.  Not in the way most people get there; mine is a hybrid of sidewalk-alumnus and half-assing my way through grad school attempting to relive college. But I staked myself to it, I have an equity stake in the tribal enterprise, and I’m fully invested – financially and emotionally – in my alma mater.

Now I have to go back. Get to go back, really, with as near to a guarantee of a winning game as exists in college football today.  But I won’t see any of the people I knew back then, with one possible exception that had nothing to do with academia.  Instead, I’m meeting up with a bunch of folks who know me as a Twitter avatar, a paragraph of shtick at Anchor of Gold, a hat-and-sunglassed Instagram picture.  They don’t even know my real name, and I don’t particularly know who they are.  But fair’s fair, because I’m still trying to figure out who I am, too.

I can tell you this for a fact, though : it isn’t the guy who would have shown up in 1997.