by Stephanie Piper
My off-again, on-again affair with Knoxville is wavering.
I came here hating it, sight (almost) unseen, a position I steadfastly maintained for years one and two.
I underwent a mini-conversion in the mid-1980s. The lyrical spring! The lingering autumn! The negligible cost of real estate! For a while there, I sounded like a Chamber of Commerce brochure.
Now approaching year 17, I'm back to iffy. The place feels like a slightly vague friend who keeps promising to meet me for lunch but never shows up. I have lived here longer than I've ever lived anywhere. I remain an outsider, a duck in a chicken coop. Not better. Not worse. Just not-from-around-these-parts.
So leave, you're saying. Go back where you came from. Knoxville can manage just fine with one less disaffected Yankee woman hanging around.
The problem with going home is that you have to know where home is. The New York suburb where I grew up is not really where I'm from—no one is really from those places. Chappaqua was founded by the Quakers in the 1700s. I did not know a single Quaker in all the years I lived there, nor did I know anyone whose parents were born in the town. There were IBM families and General Foods families and a collection of other corporate gypsies. And there were people like my parents, who grew up 40 miles away but chose better schools and bigger houses over their hometowns.
My real roots are in Manhattan, I guess, where my immigrant ancestors settled in the 19th century. Ninety-nine percent of my blood kin live in metro New York, as firmly provincial a group as any East Tennesseans I've ever met. Cousins, encountered at wakes and weddings, shake their heads at me in wonder and ask about life in Fort Knox, or Nashville. Knoxville does not appear on their radar screens.
Manhattan has never looked better. Mayor Giuliani, the ultimate urban hall monitor, has whipped the place into shape, or so it seems to me on a recent visit. It's clean(er). It's (sort of) friendly. Times Square is Disney World-spotless.
But midtown feels like a Technicolor panic attack. I've lost the fast forward rhythm of walking crosstown blocks. I bump into people. I stumble over curbstones, trying to make the light.
The last time I lived in New York City, I was a 29-year-old mother of three, cash poor but rich in coping skills. I could maneuver a folding stroller through Bloomingdale's and tell you where to change trains for the Canarsie Line. Now I move like an out-of-towner, my shoulder bag clutched to my chest, my eyes wandering upward. The place I'm from is the place I alternately long for and dread.
Back in Knoxville, I equivocate. I could learn again to muscle my way through crowds and to speak in a loud, definite voice. I might even come to believe that a two-hour commute isn't bad and a half-million dollar house is a stunning bargain.
But the decades away have left their mark. I've grown used to the sounds of mourning doves and cicadas. I'm used to the little flat-roofed library where I spend my lunch hour and the bank teller whose "yew have a vurr good daaaay" is part command, part benediction. I'm used to dawn walks by the lake and the lemony smell of magnolias.
I drive to Scott County through the rising Cumberlands and pull over, breathless, at the edge of a rural road. How could I leave this, ever? I drive home along the unrelieved ugliness of Kingston Pike. How can I stay here? I live in a place where I will always be a stranger. I live in a place where education is considered a kind of frill, like finger bowls or French cuffs.
I live in a place the poet R.B. Morris says might have cradled the actual Garden of Eden. Don't you realize, he asks, this is paradise?
Well, maybe. I'm not from here, but here is where I am. As for going home again, it may be overrated.
Or it may be that the place I'm looking for doesn't appear on any map at all.
March 2, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 9
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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