Walking in Memphis

"...prodigality is the law, and excess alone is sufficient..."

- Fr. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 1968

You never appreciate the subtle importance of a grid system until you have lost it - as I did for the eight years I was in Nashville. I could never find my sense of direction there. I even asked native Nashvillians (I almost wrote "Nashvillains") about this, and they, too, admitted that - despite having been born and grown up in the city - the cardinal directions still eluded them on an intuitive level. There is nothing so disorienting as trying to dead-reckon in a city in which you have no sense of direction.

In this sense, Memphis was a cool, clear breeze. North and south, east and west, these are on friendly terms again with my psyche. There are a few roads that remain cattywompous (that's a technical term for "indecipherable"), but they are the exception, not the rule. Moreover, Memphis was resistant to the introduction of an interstate through-way cutting across the heart of the city. By this little act of defiance, they gained a lovely green space (Overton Park, with a museum, a zoo, and a symphony band shell), and maintained these old, broad, tree-lined boulevards that give the city a very different feel than, say, Atlanta, with its cramped arteries and traffic congestion.

This city is an experiment. We are here for a year, at least to start with. We came up for three days in late July to find a place to live, and settled on a house that is perhaps a little beyond our means in terms of space and rent, but that is close enough to Christian Brothers University (my reason for being here for the next twelve months) that I can walk to work.

* * *

Walking is the great adventure, the next frontier. For a long time, now, I have been stymied by my dependence upon the petrochemical culture in this country. I have resisted it in certain ways - most notably by refusing to buy in to the macho egotism of the semi-annual new car purchase. Instead, I got my absolute money's worth out of the old Nissan I purchased back in '96. It's got nearly 250,000 miles on it, looks like absolute Hell, and still runs fine getting nearly thirty miles to the gallon. If you discount the costs of gas, but include purchase and repair costs, that comes out to my having spent around $.06 for every mile I've gotten out of the car. Not bad.

So the plan, and the hope, is that, having moved to a central, walkable location, I can get rid of the car. Kira and I will pare down to a one-car existence, with added benefits like more exercise for both of us and less stress on my left (read: clutch kicking) leg and hip, which have both been troubling me of late.

There have been little forays already, in the several weeks I have been here prior to Kira's permanent arrival. Walking to Bob's Barksdale Restaurant, which serves the best freakin' breakfast in the city (Those of you who know me well know what a find such a place was, and close by!), was followed by a leisurely stroll over the Cathedral, which is about a mile from our doorstep, down the lovely tree-lined and shady Central Avenue. Evenings have been spent exploring Cooper-Young, our new neighborhood, with its panoply of shops and restaurants.

* * *

We call the new place "Kookyshoes." It is a two-storey, rambling collapse of a place, painted an indescribable shade of sea-foam green (is it blue? not exactly. Is it green? not precisely. It is too pale to be pretty, and too dark to be soothing - sort of like a hospital wall). I gave it the name one blistering hot day as I was pulling into the driveway, my air conditioning in the car failing yet again. Everything at that moment - no AC in the car, no AC in the house, boxes everywhere, no time to unpack them, too many huge things to do, money draining out of accounts like we had cracked a levee, and Kira two hundred miles away for the next several weeks - just seemed so absurd, the name just made perfect sense all of a sudden. Ol' Kookyshoes. Don't pay no mind, tha's just Ol' Kookyshoes's way.

Anthropomorphizing can help, those moments when you can only just barely keep from screaming with the rage in your skull. For me, I imagined the house as a doddering old man, well meaning but incompetent, and needy of our care and understanding. The house - Hell, the whole damn situation, was needful of much charity. That I have not yet murdered somebody in all this frustration piled upon frustration is proof enough to me of powerful forces of benevolence at work in the restraint of my soul, forces much greater than my own sorry will. I take a moment here to thank the angels for the patience I have been granted under their care.

* * *

Everything I wear these days is pretty intentional. A couple years back, Kira and I were traveling in the Netherlands with some friends and we got caught in a rainstorm on the way to the train station, and ended up shivering and being chilled throughout the rest of the long day on the train and after. Since that time, I have been on a quest for clothing that manages temperature and moisture more effectively than my old cotton t-shirts and blue jeans.

The result is that most days I dress, like my old friend Chris had pointed out, like I was ready for monsoon season in India.

I look a little peculiar, I guess, in my ventilated shirts, Tilley hat, and convertable cargo pants. However, the clothes I wear leave me mostly fearless in both the rain and the beating sun. Needless to say, as I was exploring Memphis neighborhoods near Ol' Kookyshoes on foot, I was well-served by this get up. With the exception of one unfortunate run in with a patch of chiggers (little red no-see-um bugs that make your like an itchy Hell for a week), I have been pretty well protected and comfortable.

One Sunday, coming back from the Cathedral and, after, the coffee shop around the bend, I spotted a woman in the late forties weaving her way toward me on the sidewalk. As we passed, she slurred the words (in an accent? Perhaps, or perhaps it was simple intoxication), "Hello, Austrian!"

I am not Austrian. Not yet, at least. But I took it as a promising sign.

* * *

Now it's thirty years ago, and I am sitting in the gymnasium, playing Governor Fob James. I am presiding behind a desk with a microphone, and my suit does not quite fit, and I have been given a top hat that now sits on the desk in front of me. For some reason I am the narrator over our elementary school play, written by our teachers. It extolls the history of all things Alabama, from our Phenix City, deep in the east, to the muscled shoals of the north, and all the long acres between stretching west and south. I remember I could not pronounce "Appamatox," always stressing the wrong syllable, no matter how many times my loquacious tongue tried to work its way around the word. I remember the parade of bored miscreants that passed for my classmates, the actors in this embellished pageant, portraying the shambling and various characters that, apparently from the representation, bumped and mumbled the state to great heights.

Most acutely, I remember the retiring and ashen-skinny young boy in blackface, clutching a borrowed coronet and clad in a bowtie, standing straight at the microphone and telling us the brief but vital history of the man W.C. Handy. I cannot today recall the name of the youth, but I have never thought of him as anything but noble. In such a hostile context, there in the rusty buckle of the Bible Belt, he could easily have played the role in many a deprecating manner, yet he wore his stain nobly. He spoke quietly, but audibly and articulately, despite his tendency in normal speech to stumble over words. That morning he took especial care to be heard, and in my minds eye I see his dignity. Sometimes, in the years since, though I cannot explain exactly how, that simple memory has strengthened me.

* * *

I ignored Jesus again today. He's the man who lives under the railroad trestle, just around the corner from where we live. He has buggy eyes and, every time I've encountered him, he's been wearing what I can only describe as one of those old-timey football helmets. I know he's Jesus, even though I have not yet met him, and he scares me, and I am afraid to talk with him, or to listen to his questions when I think he is going to ask me for money. Each time, as I pass under the trestle or through the little park where he sleeps some nights, I walk to the other side of the street if I see him coming. One time he nodded at me. He knows that I know.

Jesus is the toughest. The minor prophets are easier. The guy who stopped me on Central Avenue today to ask me for change for the bus told me his name was Malachi. No kidding. I gave him the six bits I had in my pocket, wished him a pleasant ride, and walked away wondering at how the stitching that holds together the universe seems more bare to me here - like the laces of a football beneath my fingertips, or the rough thickness of a sewn-up scar.

* * *

And then, later that night, as I was driving home, there, without any irony whatsoever on the Elvis-heavy radio station, was the old Marc Cohn song, "Walking in Memphis." As I listened, I was overcome with the oddest feeling. The feeling was full, and heavy, and very undeniably there, all at suddenly once. It was the feeling that follows the unexpected rearrangement of a long-familiar room. The fact that the room was inside me only made it that much more immediate.

Whereas before, I just enjoyed the song, suddenly when the lyric got to mentioning Union Avenue, and Hollywood, I suddenly had a picture in my mind of both those places. I get my mail down on Union, where the PO box is, and I pass Hollywood when I head east. These places in that old song are now, overwhelmingly, my places.

And I had to pull the car over. For, you see, I was weeping, and for a couple of minutes, I couldn't stop.

* * *

I am not sure what I am doing here, Lord. I have uprooted my life and my suddenly-expanding family to a new place, with radical hopes and not much in the way of security and assurance. I missed my wife so much when she was not here. Now that she is here, some moments I find I am also missing the solitude of those weeks terribly. My soul is always so confused. My life is a series of moments in which I always feel I should be doing something else, no matter what it is that I am doing at that moment.

I pray for some peace in all this newness and upheaval, some peace in my restless soul.

And a direction, Lord. Point me out a direction.

Prayer, and some place to walk to, that's what my soul needs.

I pray. I walk.

I hope.