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This past weekend, Cindy and I attended the DU Shoot in Nashville at the
beautiful "Tennessee Clay Target Complex" (scores
& pictures). While there, I took the opportunity to revisit my
childhood memories of Tennessee.
I spent my summers as a teenager with my grandparents on a small farm
twenty miles outside of Nashville, near a small town called Lebanon.
I passed the house that my father built after WWII, where my
grandparents lived for forty plus years. It seems smaller than I
remember. The front yard that I mowed with a push mower doesn't seem
as big looking back now.
A "no trespassing" sign prevented me from seeing if the log cabin my
father was born in still stands. The old gravel road that has run in
front of the property since the Civil War still exists, but it dead ends
at the main highway. |
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General Hatton, a hero of the War Between the States, still guards
the square at Lebanon, the square where my grandfather and I would visit
on weekends. It's here where the old men would gather to talk,
whittle pieces of cedar and spit tobacco juice on the sidewalk. The
Nashville area has grown and now could be any cosmopolitan city in the
U.S. The line starts early at Starbucks and bib overalls have been
replaced by designer jeans.
Going to Tennessee as a boy meant cane pole fishing in the lake, the
sound of the screen door opening and closing, and swatting flies with the
ever present swatter.
I visited the cemetery. My grandfather, grandmother and
namesake-uncle are there. The only change is that my mother and
father have joined them. For me there are two Nashvilles now, the one
that exists in 2004 and the one of my youth. |
