Metro Pulse/Guest Editorial/Once More, with Feeling

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Goodbye to bygones, pretty and otherwise

by Jack Mauro

It doesn't escape me that there's something a bit contradictory in writing a farewell letter to a city on the heels of a tribute to the happiness of living in it. Either I lied in the tribute [Feb. 5 cover story] or am unforgivably fickle.

Or. Life happened, circumstances changed, and I need boxes. It is just that blandly simple. The gods reserve destiny-charged motivations for fatter fish than me, I suppose.

In my preface to 2000's Gay Street: Stories of Knoxville, Tennessee, I recalled the dull ache lodged in my ribcage upon leaving Knoxville in 1996. It throbbed there, as tell-tale and incessant as any evidence immortalized by Poe, for two bitter years. Until I returned in '98. I believed then that this misery merited examination, as I do now; after all, I'd only been a resident here for a few years before quitting the town. What had Knoxville done to me, whence this unaccountable sadness for a place discovered so late in my life?

I had no full answer, but I eventually had part of it. I left wrong.

There were in 1996 too many pasteboard rationales behind which I hid: I'm going to a better job (hardly); Knoxville isn't much (define much); Pittsburgh is an interesting and exciting city (Sweet Mother of God). I beat down, time and again, surfacing doubt. I ignored my instincts, a practice deadly in cooking, shopping, love and everything else in one's life. I closed my eyes and got on the plane, playing possum to my soul.

Well. That was then. I am older now. I doubt I am wiser. Yet I now wholly possess the disinclination that passes—quite rightly, too—for wisdom: Subterfuge of any kind is a ridiculous waste of time. Out with it, and out with it all. And honoring a truth, any truth, eases the often painful repercussions of facing it.

So, I say goodbye to Knoxville again. This time, I say too: I love this f—king place. I always will.

Still can't say exactly why, though. Now as before, there is no single trait of the city, no particular expression of itself, I can point to as the source of the midnight regret which is sure to seize me in months to come. I am in fact less pleased with directions Knoxville has taken since I came back. The sumptuous vulgarity of Krutch Park is gone, a razing nigh profane to me. I believe there is, as well, far too much self-defeating civic ambition of late, a too frantic and thus unattractive longing to be a respected, formidable metropolis. Great cities, like great people, almost always evolve into greatness by accident, virtually unnoticed, and long before the publicity takes over.

Then, college towns are not cities I ever generally cared for. They are, not surprisingly, riddled with students, a form of life I find simultaneously terrifying and inert. Even more traitorously, a UT Vols loss doesn't emotionally cripple me. That is, I'm of the ilk that has a hard time in hinging my affection for Knoxville upon the score sheet of a dozen or so kids in orange and white. Good luck, kick whomever's ass, and all that. But football ain't war, and the victories or losses of it shouldn't be quite as blessed or mourned. Yes, I do know hefty revenue is involved. Yet I recall no new trash receptacles or more cops on the streets after the Perfect Season of 1998. I do recall students I worked with mentioning how linebackers were more breezily excused from classes, though.

And I don't like night life. The very phrase slithers.

Nonetheless—I love Knoxville. I will miss it vigorously. Which brings me back to that hazy something of '96, the thing beyond my lousy closure then that had me longing to return. I still don't know what it is. But I have a hunch. It isn't terribly dramatic, and it can't be bottled by city promoters. I trace it to my first months here. I connect the dots of the bank teller who was kind to me, to the Old City florist—now long gone—who hailed me on the street and made genial conversation as though I were worth a stop, to the motley and excellent crew I cursed at and joked with at Club LeConte, to the sublime and soft mountains framing the life I was finding, to the thrill of meeting Patricia Neal, to the loneliness of choosing to be alone, to every cheesy Knoxville-based commercial on TV that made me both cringe and smile with pride. The dots connect and I think I see a pattern.

I love Knoxville because it let me love it. For that, my gratitude is boundless.

Jack Mauro is an exceptional writer whose works in fiction and what almost passes for fact have graced Metro Pulse pages for not nearly enough years. He's moving to Hartford, Conn. 'Bye, Jack.