This afternoon I will light out toward my homeland of east Tennessee. It is a trip I have made too many times to remember over the course of these thirty seven and a half years.
I am excited for the trip. It will be the first time in many years that I will go to Knoxville and not stay with family. Sometimes I think family matters have unfairly clouded my judgement about my hometown and I plan to test that theory.
The advent of social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, et al) has made it easy for a person like myself to reconnect with the folks that were lost along the way or maybe even just peer in to see what people from the past are up to from afar. With the good ones (friends, that is) I seem to have made more meaningful connections and we converse away from the social sites (thank God!) via phone or email or both.
Rick Greene and I have known each other since high school. We met at his alma mater when both of our lazy asses were attending summer school because we both either sucked at math OR were just to lazy to apply ourselves (or a combination of both - which I will readily admit characterizes my high school experience). We lost touch with one another as we navigated our way into the "real world". My travels took me to Oregon where I would spend the next six or seven years. Rick's path kept him in our hometown where he worked, went to school, and had more of the crazy experiences that seem to have embodied our friendship the first go-round.
Tonight, for the first time in almost 20 years, Mr. Greene and I will meet again on hometown turf. It's a weird thing to think about and, perhaps, even weirder to type; but it is something that I genuinely look forward to doing. Over several lengthy phone conversations and countless email correspondences, we have found that we have (maybe) not changed so much that we don't still have lots of the same common ground that we shared many years ago. We have gotten balder, crankier, and older; but the general framework remains. While we were once "showroom new", we have now entered the "almost vintage" stage.
We have decided to innagurate our new/old friendship by taking a road trip to my gig at the Memorial Benefit for Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. What better way to get to know one another again than to travel to the Memorial for a well-known Appalachian moonshiner and all around character? As Rick commented via email yesterday, "It will be like 'On the Road' meets 'Grumpy Old Men'". Truly, it may be more the latter than the former, but I am up for whatever the challenge may be.
So, come see us over in Maggie Valley. It'll be fun to get out and do some picking and get a roadtrip and reunion all in one package. And they say Disneyland is fun. This has the makin's of a good weekend, if you ask me.
I am excited for the trip. It will be the first time in many years that I will go to Knoxville and not stay with family. Sometimes I think family matters have unfairly clouded my judgement about my hometown and I plan to test that theory.
The advent of social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, et al) has made it easy for a person like myself to reconnect with the folks that were lost along the way or maybe even just peer in to see what people from the past are up to from afar. With the good ones (friends, that is) I seem to have made more meaningful connections and we converse away from the social sites (thank God!) via phone or email or both.
Rick Greene and I have known each other since high school. We met at his alma mater when both of our lazy asses were attending summer school because we both either sucked at math OR were just to lazy to apply ourselves (or a combination of both - which I will readily admit characterizes my high school experience). We lost touch with one another as we navigated our way into the "real world". My travels took me to Oregon where I would spend the next six or seven years. Rick's path kept him in our hometown where he worked, went to school, and had more of the crazy experiences that seem to have embodied our friendship the first go-round.
Tonight, for the first time in almost 20 years, Mr. Greene and I will meet again on hometown turf. It's a weird thing to think about and, perhaps, even weirder to type; but it is something that I genuinely look forward to doing. Over several lengthy phone conversations and countless email correspondences, we have found that we have (maybe) not changed so much that we don't still have lots of the same common ground that we shared many years ago. We have gotten balder, crankier, and older; but the general framework remains. While we were once "showroom new", we have now entered the "almost vintage" stage.
We have decided to innagurate our new/old friendship by taking a road trip to my gig at the Memorial Benefit for Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. What better way to get to know one another again than to travel to the Memorial for a well-known Appalachian moonshiner and all around character? As Rick commented via email yesterday, "It will be like 'On the Road' meets 'Grumpy Old Men'". Truly, it may be more the latter than the former, but I am up for whatever the challenge may be.
So, come see us over in Maggie Valley. It'll be fun to get out and do some picking and get a roadtrip and reunion all in one package. And they say Disneyland is fun. This has the makin's of a good weekend, if you ask me.
***This blog post powered by: Malcolm Holcombe - "Yesterday's Clothes"
