My Nashville adolescence was a time adrift without any clear idea of who or what I wanted to be. The people around me in public high school all seemed like people I wouldn’t want to become, and they seemed to view me in the same light. I worried a lot about what kind of life I should aspire to.
First I was a preadolescent substitute janitor at a specialty magazine, in a gloomy old three-story house near Vanderbilt where Dad and other men (only men) chronicled the enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education and pounded manual typewriters and mostly just wanted me to empty their ashtrays.
Fifty years after his death, I still see my paternal grandfather very clearly. I see him in black and white.
The collaboration between readers and writers works so well because words are the common bond, the gift humans possess like no other living creature. We are all writers and practitioners of language — speaking, text messaging, emailing, tweeting. Perhaps now more than ever before, we’re seeing why words matter, how their use divides us or unites us, and how we hope words can salve and heal our wounds.
Although everyone still called me the resident Victorian, truth was I had been shirking. And I’m not sure when I would have returned if it had not been for my friend Sarah.
My mother and grandmother used to drive me to North Carolina every summer for camp where, as memory serves, the squirrels were white, the dawns were dewy, and the threat of lake snakes never did come to fruition.
