[Cut now to the image in my mind’s eye, of hands feverishly raised, and my saying, “No, you heard me right. F-r-i-e-n-d-s-v-i-l-l-e, Tennessee. What? No, of course I didn’t just make that up. That’s what my town is really called! Yeah, I know, it is rather dear, isn’t it…?”]
Okay, so let me guess: whiplash anyone? I mean, for those of you whose address books I’ve made a scrawled-out mess of through the years and who learned early on to always note my latest address in pencil and not pen, were you to hold that “A” page up to the light and study the smudged palimpsest under Anderson, T., what you’d see would read something like this: Leningrad, Moscow, London, Vienna, Taipei, NYC, Washington, DC, Boston…
In other words, were this that section of the GRE where you’re asked to extrapolate the next logical item in a series, I think we can all agree that Friendsville, TN would not be the multiple choice answer you’d go with. And I have to say that, when it comes to tire-screeching, 180-degree lifestyle changes, this latest move has probably been the most dramatic of all. Which does rather prompt the question: why Friendsville?
Well, at the risk of sounding like one of those resignation-tendering Cabinet officials of the Bush era, my answer to that question is this: “I wanted to spend more time with my family.” But not in that “inside-the-beltway” euphemistic sense. No, as an only child who’d just gone through the wrenching loss of a grandmother, an extraordinary woman who was both second mother and best friend to me, I felt an overwhelming desire to come home. To live close once more to those two others I hold most dear in life, my mom and dad. That I’d have to turn my life upside-down to do so? So be it. For throughout all those moves and all those lonely “another-suitcase-in-another-hall” moments, my parents have always been the one anchoring constant in my life. So while I’ll never have a hometown to return to in the physical sense, I do have one in the emotional sense and that’s wherever my parents are. And since for the last several years that’s been on a lush rolling horse farm in Friendsville, TN, now you know what brought me here.
Kinda schmaltzy, I know, but there you have it. And I have to say, as someone for whom that Hallmark sentiment, “My parents by birth, my friends by choice,” has always rung true, this was a homecoming long overdue.
