"What was the weirdest thing about moving from New York to Tennessee?"

After Day 28, I figured Day 29 could stay light, so I've been saving this topic all month. My friend Shannon would like to know:

"What was the weirdest thing about moving from New York to Tennessee?"

This is a good question, because there's a lot of weird stuff here. This, for example, belonged to one of my neighbors when I moved in:



and this was parked next to it:



I moved here during the election year when Tennessee voted to ban gay marriage:



and discovered that there are anti-gay, anti-abortion Democratic politicians.

No, really.

They are farther to the right than New York Republicans. Discovering that they existed was also weird.

None of this, though, was actually the weirdest thing. The thing that freaked me out the most, and kept catching me off guard for weeks after I moved here, was that total strangers talk to you in the grocery store if you happen to look up and make eye contact.

And it's hard not to make eye contact when you're steering a cart.

Every time I came around a corner, someone would look up, smile, and say hi. Sometimes they even added a "How are you?", and for weeks I was constantly offering a tentative, "....Hello....?" while internally thinking, "I DON'T KNOW YOU!" I was from New York, and in New York you don't make eye contact with strangers unless you're trying to intimidate them. And if strangers talk to you, you certainly don't engage in conversation. They might be trying to rob you or get you to join their cult or something.

That was then, of course.

Now I carry on entire conversations with the cashier at Kroger and don't bat an eye. Southern hospitality may be something worth having after all.

My History with "The Secret History"

I'm currently rereading Donna Tartt's The Secret History, something I tend to do every year or year and a half or so. It's one of my three favorite books (the other two being F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a novel of terrible unfulfilled longing, and Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life, a novel of wonder and sadness), and is the book I recommend most often to friends who ask for "a good book". I realized this morning that I most often get the urge to reread it during the winter, as it is fixed in my head as a winter book for two reasons: the first being that even though the book takes place over the course of a year, most of the important action happens during winter and a snowy spring, and the second being that the first time I read it was during winter break in my freshman year of college.

I was aware of "The Secret History" before reading it, because I'd read a review in "People" magazine that seemed interesting. (I don't know if "People" still does book reviews, but back in the 1990's they did.) I also heard about it here and there because for a while it seemed like everyone was reading this book; it wasn't the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day, but it might have been that fall's Gone Girl. I saw it in people's bags, noticed it in people's hands at the doctor's office or the dentist, but being that the internet was still a tiny baby in 1993 and I was not connected, I had no idea that people out in the wider world were talking about it in book groups and public libraries. I wasn't buying a lot of new books as a college freshman, since most of my disposable income was going toward going out on the weekends (and weekdays), comic books, and paying for the incidentals of college, but right before I left to go home for December break I noticed "The Secret History" on the new releases wall at the college library. Paging through, I recognized Donna Tartt's author photo from the "People" magazine review and vaguely remembered thinking that the review seemed interesting, and checked it out for the break.

I took it home, read it in the first two days of break, and upon finishing immediately began reading it again.

It's not hard to figure out what about this book connected with me. It's well written and engaging, but the real hook is that in my head Hampden College, the fictitious liberal arts college of less than 500 students in "The Secret History", became St. Lawrence University, the tiny liberal arts private school of less than 3,000 students that I wanted to attend but didn't. St. Lawrence was old and historical, like Hampden, and seemed filled with the kind of people that I wanted to be friends with: somewhat intelligent and casually wealthy, people who would recognize me as the special snowflake that I thought I was and embrace me as one of their own, people who seemed to my teenaged mind to just be a better class of people, one that I wanted to belong to. It would be several years before I realized that if I had gone to St. Lawrence I would have been in the same position as Richard, the narrator of "The Secret History", a middle class kid on financial aid trying to blend in with the privileged, wealthy elitists around him. Given that true life rarely works out as well as fiction, I doubt I would have been as readily embraced, and would probably have been somewhat miserable, stressed, and perpetually envious and resentful of my classmates. I was admitted to St. Lawrence and won a scholarship that would have covered $20,000 a year, but at the time attendance cost around $40,000 a year, and my parents wouldn't (and couldn't) pay the rest. Mom and dad, if you're reading, I'm not mad about this anymore.

My freshman year, though, when I picked up this book, I definitely still was. I hadn't settled into Cortland yet after only a semester, and was still resentful that I'd ended up having to go there instead of the snobbish expensive private school of my dreams, and here was a book whose snobbish expensive private school seemed to be exactly the one that I was missing out on: the wacky, entertaining characters in the book seemed better than the wacky, entertaining characters that I saw every day; the weekend parties seemed so much more interesting and glamorous than the weekend parties I went to; even the classrooms sounded better. This is, of course, because all of these things were fiction, but in my head they became the things that I was missing out on, and I embraced the book with bitter sadness, sure on some level that this was exactly the exciting life that I was deprived of by selfish parents. (Again, mom and dad, these were my feelings at the time. Please don't read this and then call me to talk this out. It's totally fine now.) Even the fact that the book's main plot revolves around the murder of a classmate and close friend of the main characters' seemed like the kind of exciting, sightly romantic adventure that I wasn't having at college. Nothing in "The Secret History" seemed wrong to me, but with age and (alleged) maturity I now read the book with more of a sense of the moral ambiguity. I can't ever decide now if Henry is evil or noble, and I'm no longer as sure that my own actions would mirror those of Richard, the narrator.

I did start eating, and do still eat, cream cheese and orange marmalade sandwiches because Charles did in the book. You should try it. They're delicious, especially on toast.

At any rate, this library copy was one of the four copies of the book that I've read over the years. When I felt like reading it again after that first December break I picked up a secondhand paperback copy at A Second Look Bookstore in Watertown, New York, with credit that I got from turning in some other books. At some point over the years this paperback copy, already a little banged up when I got it, wore out, and I replaced it with a hardcover. Oddly enough, I have no idea when or where I made this switch, but I know exactly when the copy that I'm reading now was purchased: I got it in Alexandria, Virginia, in June 2006 at a used bookstore just down the street from the restaurant where this truck with a horse statue and flag in the bed was parked:



I know the exact timing because I'd gone on a road trip to Washington, DC, with my friend Dana, and he had a specific purpose in going: he was going to meet up with friends at college on the steps of the Lincoln Monument at 6 PM on June 6, 2006. His car couldn't make the trip and I wanted to get out of town, so we took my car and stayed in Alexandria. The bookstore was between our stop on the Metro and our hotel, and I bought the book when I went into the bookstore by myself on our way back from dinner one of the nights that we were there. Dana didn't want to go into the bookstore with me (this happens to me a lot with friends and used bookstores; I can wander for hours looking for obscurities, and friends who have done it once often find excuses not to do it again) and went back to the hotel, and I picked up the hardcover for ten dollars when I saw it because I'd been unable to locate my copy that past winter when I'd wanted to read it. I assumed that I'd let someone borrow it and they hadn't returned it, and since I couldn't remember who I figured that it was gone and I needed a replacement.

On the way back from that trip I got the call to come interview for my current job in Tennessee, scheduling my travel in the passenger seat while Dana was driving my car, somewhere in Pennsylvania on the way back to New York. The trip was less productive for Dana: Our plan was that I would meet up with him and his friends at the Lincoln Monument at six and then we would all go to dinner, because I wanted to go tour the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where you can watch money being printed but can't take photographs inside:



(and where the tour guides all say, over and over, "No, the tour doesn't include any samples," ending the statement with a bitter chuckle that tells you that this is a joke they've heard a thousand times before and now find rage-inducing), and Dana wanted to sit and contemplate life and write in his journal all day. I walked around Washington, something I'd done many times before, aimlessly wandering and taking photographs in beautiful summer sunshine:







was hit in the leg by a falling cherry:



as I passed beneath a tree:



and at six rushed to the Lincoln Monument:



There I am, there's the Lincoln Monument, and there's Dana's journal on the step, but none of Dana's friends are in the picture because none of them came. Two of them called, but overall the trip was a bust for him. Dana and I took one more road trip before the end of summer, to Boston, where my car was totalled by a drunk driver:



and then I moved to Tennessee and, in October, decided to alphabetize all of my books by author:



While doing so, I discovered that either my old copy of "The Secret History" hadn't been lost, or whoever had borrowed it had returned it before I moved, because I suddenly had two copies. I decided to take the copy from Alexandria (distinguishable by the price written inside the front cover, something my old copy didn't have) to McKay's, my local used bookstore, but somehow got the two copies switched. The next time I felt like rereading it, I discovered that I still had the Alexandria copy and had turned in the other.

Somehow this seems ok to me because the Alexandria copy, as I wrote above, has a secret history.

Exploring in East Tennessee

After my February trip to neighboring Concord it was my goal to keep visiting the cities, towns, and villages around mine on a fairly regular basis. I kept getting caught up in stuff, though, or planning other things, or just getting tired, and I never got around to getting out again to work on exploring until this morning. Randomly clicking on wikipedia pages for my neighboring communities, I happened upon Maynardville and the picture of their courthouse.

My friend Sandy says that almost every town in Georgia has a historic courthouse, and it's been my experience that most of the towns in Tennessee are the same way. They're usually brick (sometimes whitewashed), they usually have columns out front, and they sometimes have a cupola, clock tower, or memorial statue. Take the one here in Knoxville, for example:



or the one in Sevierville, just up the road:



They're so similar that if you saw the two photos right next to each other, with no captions, you could easily assume that they're the same building from two different angles, and this seems to be the standard model for Tennessee county courthouses. Union County, on the other hand, boasts unique and somewhat unattractive courthouse, and as soon as I saw it on the wikipedia page I wanted to go see it.

It's just as unattractive in the flesh:



It's a box. A featureless concrete box, completely devoid of character or charm:



I can't even imagine what it must be like to enter the building. While it's possible that it has skylights I'm betting that it doesn't, and those little slits of windows can't possibly let in any natural light. It looks like it belongs behind the Iron Curtain or attached to a factory or something, and I can't imagine how it ended up in Tennessee. Not only that, but there's no landscaping around it. It's surrounded by parking, a concrete island in an asphalt sea. Who approved this design, and did they give any thought to the impression this makes of the county as a whole?

Either way, there wasn't really anything to see near the courthouse. I don't know a lot about Maynardville, but I'd guess it's in decline, as the courthouse was surrounded by vacant storefronts and closed businesses. The gas station, a Union 76, has been closed so long that the lights are fully rusted:



The only thing that seemed to be thriving was the mortuary, whose parking lot included a very sadfaced Jesus:



After I got tired of walking around the courthouse I started for home, pulling over along the way whenever I saw something interesting, like a car on a stick:



a decrepit, closed deli and gas station:





and even a state park, the Big Ridge State Park on Route 61:



I want to go back to that, too, because I see from their wikipedia page (Remember the old days, when we didn't have wikipedia? Me either.) that there's a dam, a cemetery, a mill, and a haunted area. The only drawback is that I have to drive down State Route 61 to get there, and Route 61 was apparently designed by the construction crew from "Chutes and Ladders". The entire road is switchbacks, hairpin turns, and places where the signs tell you to drop down to ten miles per hour. I'd have taken pictures, but it's a "both hands on the wheel" kind of road.

It's also the road where I got in trouble.

On my way back to the main road from the park, I noticed another closed gas station with a rotting RC Cola machine out front, and decided to stop:





RC Cola and Moon Pies are pretty much the official snackfood of Tennessee, after all:



so I figured I might as well take a picture of the machine. Besides, it was rotting and falling apart, and everyone knows I love that. While I was walking around the parking lot taking the pictures a few cars went by, and I didn't really think anything of it, but right when I went to get back in my car a pickup truck pulled into the lot and blocked me in.

I figured it was just someone wondering what I was doing, since sometimes people stop and ask what I'm taking pictures of, but I'm also very conscious that I'm a Yankee with a pierced ear driving a VW Bug in pickup truck country below the Mason Dixon Line, and I sometimes worry that I'm about to have a problem. The sweaty, shirtless, overweight guy with the prison tattoo who got out of the truck did nothing to dispell this notion, and I worried that I might be about to get Deliveranced. In the bad way.

"What are you taking pictures of my building for? Are you from the bank?"

Really, mister? You think the bank sends people out wearing GI Joe t-shirts in VW Bugs with action figures mounted on the dashboard to foreclose on you? What the hell kind of bank are you doing business with? And oh my God, don't say any of this out loud.

"No, no," I answered, pointing at my parking pass. "I'm from the University. I'm in a photography class." Yes, I know that's a lie, but I've used it before and people seem to accept it much more easily than, "I'm going to post these on my blog and possibly make fun of them." I continued, "I saw your RC machine, and I just had to stop, especially with the way it looks just sitting there. It's kind of lonely, you know?"

He cocked his head to one side and blinkd a couple of times, and then shrugged.

"I never thought of it that way. You have a nice day, ok?"

"Oh, you too," I said, right before I got in my car and drove straight home without stopping anywhere. That's quite enough adventure for one day, thanks.

Hey, let's go to the Parthenon!

My home state, New York, has a lot of things. Statues, roller coasters, giant Life Savers rolls, headless horsemen, sleepy hollows, and all kinds of other wacky, bizarre crap that I know and love, but there's one thing that we don't have:



A Parthenon.

Tennessee wins!

OK, maybe not. New York, after all, never had a Scopes Monkey trial, but it's still pretty cool that just hours away from me there is a full scale replica of the Parthenon, leftover from Tennessee's 1897 Centennial Exposition, and a week or so ago I decided that Bryan, Kristin, and I needed to go visit it. Armed with an itinerary and a lunch recommendation from my friend Rod, who used to work at Vandy, we hopped in the car and drove to the Parthenon, just like the kids in "Percy Jackson", minus Uma Thurman's severed head.

The Parthenon at Nashville houses an art collection, a collection of plaster casts of the suriving marbles from the original Parthenon:



(and wow, Poseidon was totally ripped! See?)



and the real showpiece, a gilded statue of Athena that is the largest indoor statue in the western hemisphere:



That's me in front of it, roughly the same size as Nike, the statue in Athena's hand.

Before you can see the statue of Athena, you have to go through the Parthenon gift shop, which sells many inferior likenesses of varying sizes:



The faces on those look cheap and tacky, while the real thing looks surprisingly regal:



I could have walked around the naos staring at that thing for hours. Some of it is just the hugeness of it, as anything done on that scale and then covered in gold leaf tends to draw the eye, but some of it is also the intricacy and the attention to detail. It's like twenty statues piled on top of one big one, as if Athena were a giant covered with Lilliputians. The shield, for example, is covered with figures from Greek myth:





Not only that, but another set of figures representing other myths and characters is painted on the inside:





The statue of Nike is a small work of art on its own:



and even Athena's sandals,



costume, and crown:



are covered with intricate, smaller details. The room itself, the naos, is equally impressive, flanked at the far end by huge bronze doors:



There is a matching set of doors in the treasury room behind the naos, and both sets are decorated with heads and medallions:



Kristin stood by one to give a sense of scale:



and then demonstrated that even though the doors weigh about seven tons each, they are hung well enough on bearings and pivots that you can move them with a gentle push from one hand:



The treasury room also holds a mini-museum to the construction of the Nashville Parthenon, with molds, sketches, and plaster models of the exterior pediment sculptures:



After you stare at them and then go back and stare at Athena again for a while, you can go outside and stare at the real, concrete ones:



Since I'm a big nerd, it was a pretty fascinating experience, but it can be a little jarring to be immersed in the Parthenon for an hour and then to go outside and glimpse Nashville through the columns:



The Parthenon is the only building from the exposition still surviving on the Centennial Park site, although it's not the original, which was built of brick, plaster, and wood. There are some other relics scattered around the park grounds, though, like the pond, some columns and statues, and this:



That's a concrete ship's bow, representing the dreadnought Tennessee. The bronze on the front:



is from the original battleship. The concrete is crumbling, which can be expected from something meant to be temporary that is over a hundred years old, and only extends a few feet past the bronze sculpture before coming to a flat stop. There is a staircase in the middle for people to climb up pretend they are on the ship, so of course we did:





and, yes, Bryan's king of the world, because "Titanic" has seeped so far into our collective consciousness that it's now a default gesture whenever anyone gets near the front of a ship.

After we ran out of things to see in the park we drove around the back of the Vandy campus to get to Jackson's Bar and Bistro, which was pretty busy since we wandered in at brunchtime:



We split a beer cheese appetizer:



and I had a delicious grilled pimento cheese BLT:



minus the T, since I dislike tomatoes. After lunch we walked around the neighborhood a little, went to an interesting bookstore across the street, and then decided to head for the Nashville City Cemetery, since we couldn't think of anything else to do and none of us were sure of how to get to Music Row. I really need to plan a better itinerary next time, I think.

The cemetery contained a surprising number of above the ground tombs (surprising to me, anyway, since I think of those as something that's needed more in swampier climates), including this oddly coffin-shaped one:



A lot of the statues are very eroded or broken:







but some of the stones and urns are still in very good shape:





I mean, it's pretty clear what's going on here, even with a little erosion:



This stone was probably the oddest one we saw:



I figure a boulder with a lamp on top has to have a story behind it, but this is all I've been able to find. The lack of information made for a frustrating end to a pretty fun day.