Still Life in Cornwall

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been in Cornwall, Connecticut for ten days now.  The creaking old house, the quiet fields, the late-summer beauty, the town full of memories, have woven a spell about me.  The days with my brother have been spent running common errands, visiting old friends (the few who remain here), taking walks, making meals, reading and watching TV, or sitting out on the grass behind the back porch looking up at the stars.  In my childhood the Cornwall house was the setting for summer vacations from school, and by arriving here to stay a month I seem to have triggered a great recrudescence of relaxation, unconscionably abetted by the wave of balmy weather mingling the last lush verdancy with the first twinkling snowfalls of yellow leaves and sudden crimson spirals of vines, as I drove my Miata slowly half-lost down almost-familiar roads through thin woods, past open fields anchored by old barns, along already autumnal lakes.

But as I should have known, coming straight from a writers’ retreat, you can’t go back again.  It’s been a decade or so since my brother Ben took over the house after my parents died, and any change of generations in a house makes it an entirely new dwelling.  In this case Ben’s musician lifestyle has been overlaid on my parents’ literate-weekender one, so that the study is now filled unwalkably with guitars, the dining-room table hidden under disassembled amps, etc.c., and I needed to forge with two hands through a tangle of TV, Apple receiver and sound bar wires to get to the bookshelf where I pulled out my parents’ dusty, sunfaded hardcover of John Cheever short stories.

And I’m also here with a purpose.  Ben is going through a broke, hard-luck period, and in between Cheever stories and Netflix TV (he’s turned me on to the excellent “Jessica Jones” series), I’ve been trying to help him find a job and stabilize his life, pretending for the moment that I’m qualified for such a task.  We’ll see how that goes.

Despite the flavor of elder-brother intervention, we’ve been having fun together.  In addition to walks and living-room jam sessions (and “Jessica Jones”), last weekend we went down to East Haven to visit our cousin Larry Kurt and his wife Sherrie.  Larry’s the kind of great cousin who, given the sunny day, scooped us directly from the Miata into his speedboat, and within an hour of our arrival we were pounding our fiberglass bow over the blue chop on Long Island Sound.  We spent a fabulous morning on the water, drinking beer and exploring the ritzy coinage of the Thimble Islands, where every little round isle sported a million-dollar mansion. 

My cousin's speedboat, the Avalon

It was great to catch up with a side of the family I hadn’t seen in a while, and it made me wish I had a boat of my own on Puget Sound.  But the path to get there is clear enough.  (1) Find my brother a job, (2) find myself a job, (3) revise my novel and get it to that agent, (4) have it sell real well. 

We’ll see how that goes.

Me with Larry, Sherrie, and Ben

Update: The Writers' Retreat

Well, my road trip has carried me through a novel-writing retreat in Virginia, to a nursing home in Maryland where I sat with my elderly father-in-law, up the grey municipal highways through the urban snarls of the Northeast, and into the wooded hills of Connecticut, where the trees overhanging the narrow country roads were beginning to be tinged with the ochres of Autumn.  I’m now at the old family house in the town of Cornwall, where I’ll be spending the next month or so visiting with my brother.  It’s been an immense prodigal return from Zipolite to familiar scenes, with my yellow Miata at rest on the green grass of the driveway, and my laptop on the kitchen table where years ago my mother used to write. 

Yes, this in lieu of Tierra del Fuego.  As reasons for the switch I can separate out a financial, a familial, and a mercantile (I have some land for sale up here; need to check up on that), overlaid with a general refuge of indecision pending my Seattle apartment inhabited through November and newly purposed with creative ideas coming out of the writers’ retreat that would make a month’s pause welcome anywhere.  None of these excuse, in a travel sense, this alternate end of the road, and so the blog is likely to become more sporadic, hiding its head, as it were, as I immerse myself in personal affairs.  This may be the last post for a while.

But first, about that writers’ retreat.

I’d never been to a writers’ gathering of any kind before, so it was all new to me.  This one, the “Algonkian Writer Retreat and Novel Workshop,” advertised itself as a hardnosed clinic for battering your flawed manuscript into shape to meet the requirements of the market, sort of the Jack LaLanne approach to novel workshops, as opposed to those sentimental retreats based mostly on romantic settings.  Of course, it then offered a romantic setting: a line of rustic cabins along the banks of the Potomac in a wooded stretch of Algonkian Regional Park in Sterling, VA.  The mist rose over the river in the mornings, acorns fell onto the wooden porches by night, and every day I had to sweep leaves off my Miata to put the top down.  We each had a private room in the sturdy cabins, and met in the central cabin’s livingroom with wooden armchairs and firm sofas pulled into a circle.

The first surprise was that in the group of 13 writers I was the only male.  Apparently this ratio is standard in writer retreats; I’m not sure what that says about the industry, or me.  Many of the women—whose book ideas I got to know very well—were superb storytellers; all were creative, friendly people; it was a fun group with lots of laughter, and in general a pleasure for someone like me, who’s been writing in isolation, to be surrounded by fellow writers.  I can see why people go to these things.  The second surprise was that Jack LaLanne was nowhere to be found: organizer Michael Neff was softspoken, tactful, and encouraging, and while he did speak as the messenger of draconic entry requirements to the industry he did so in a thoroughly gentle and helpful way, perhaps schooled by the ratio of the frailer and no less litigious sex.

That said, he and his fellow faculty were unstinting in their market-based judgments.  In many cases the verdict on a story idea was unoriginality, and several writers were prompted to revise their books wholesale.  (Some tried to comply actually there, at the workshop, to my amazed admiration.)  In the process a picture emerged of a rabid, primary-color publishing world based on 30-second queries and immediate grab appeal, a carnival-barker atmosphere in which a given story set in Detroit might get through if the writer only “Set it in Bangladesh!”  As a newcomer to the game I could only measure the imposing battlefield with a sidelong look and keep my ears and spirit completely open.

The week went like this.  We spent the first few days polishing our “pitch,” the 200-word story summary with which to hook an agent, after which we had a chance to read them to an actual agent who visited.  From there we had each day a visiting expert who spoke to an aspect of the craft: story structure, characterization, dialogue, etc.  Some were better than others (it took one sweating fellow half an hour to set up his video component, finally saved by the children’s book writer) but all had something interesting for me to learn.  On the last day the workshop concluded with one-on-one sessions to discuss your book in detail.  Breakfasts and lunches were in the cabin; dinners were out in local restaurants, including, ironically, several outings to Mexican.

Organizer Michael Neff with Kim, Karen, and Denise, three of the attendees.

For me, I got some excellent feedback on my novel—including some plot holes pointed out that I must solve (at a Starbucks stop in Maryland I figured out how)—and more importantly a panoply of general advice that makes me impatient to go over every scene anew with a paintbucket of lessons learned in hand.  The visiting agent said I had a good pitch and story idea and she’d like to see my book.

Charlottesville: The End of the Trip (For Now)

First let me say that while I’ve been enjoying gorgeous days in the late-summer sunshine in Charlottesville, I’ve been watching the news like everyone else, and my thoughts go out to the several parts of the world reeling from natural disasters: Houston, Hurricane Irma in Florida and the Carribean, the earthquake in southern Mexico.  I feel like my little Miata has been playing dodgeball on the globe with a season of catastrophe.

But I’m about to stop dodging for a while.  Tomorrow begins my week-long novel-writing retreat in Sterling, Viriginia; after that I’ll be driving up to Connecticut to settle in at the old family place with my brother for a month or so.  As I pause here in Charlottesville it’s been slowly dawning on me that my trip as such is over—at least the bloggable portion of it.

So the blog may be coming to a halt, at least for a while.  Among the handful of friends and family who consitute its readership I suspect a certain curiosity about the writers’ retreat, at least equal to my own, so I may append some notes on that experience, but even there what was meant to be a travel blog will have half-crossed the line into something else.  On the other hand I’m clearly still “travelling,” and won’t be home to Seattle for another two and half months, and among that handful I’m aware of a default reference to this blog to keep track of where I am and whether I’m still alive.  So the long and short of it is, that I have no idea what to do with this blog.  I believe you can continue to watch this space—but at your own risk.

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In the meantime I’ve been here in Charlottesville, my last pure travel destination, for all four of the days I allotted to it.  What have I been up to?  Well, er, the truth is—ahem—I’ve been mostly sleeping.

The Airbnb I booked revealed itself to be a complete little basement apartment in an elderly family’s house half-hidden behind a runaway sunflower garden on a quiet hillside street outside town.  I greeted it as the ideal space to work on fixing up the ending of my novel, but after a few attempts I discovered it to be even more ideal as a place to stare at the walls.  I’ve been on essentially a month-long sprint from Zipolite to get here, through predatory cops, express-mail rendezvous and stomach troubles, and for the next leg I’ll need to use gears that Pepin doesn’t possess.  I needed a break.  The apartment has a kitchen, and the first night I stocked up on groceries, and I’ve just been—reacclimating.

In the process, however, I’ve fallen in love with Charlottesville.  The downtown center consists of a wide brick-walk pedestrian mall full of inviting restaurants, coffeehouses, bookstores (I counted at least three), toy stores and other eclectic shops; it’s been a splendid place to stroll and to sit with coffee—and, at The Pie Chest coffeehouse, fabulous pie.

Around the mall the city is happily lost in a dream of 18th Century Federalist architecture whose white pillars and stately red-brick facades don’t disturb the smooth black roads and modern infrastructure that swish 21st Century cars around it easily.  The second center of the town’s small ellipse consists of the University of Virginia, through which I drove on the way in and whose Jeffersonian buildings framed in the downward flutter of Fall’s first brown leaves vie for prettiness with the surrounding green mountains.

As to its late association with Nazism, my impression is that Charlottesville is mounting an appalled and concerted campiagn to reverse-associate itself with tolerance and love.  Little blue posters of “C-Ville” with a heart are in every shop window, and the signage from the municipal scale to the toystore chalkboard all sound the same theme.

Of course, ordinary people always choose love.  It doesn’t withstand a world whose leaders don’t.

Speaking of leaders, since I was in Jefferson-land I did revisit Monticello, some seventeen years after my first pilgrimage there.  In this case my experience was somewhat dampened.  In my absence the ticket price had gone up to $28.00 (from what I don’t remember), presumably to support the handsome new museum and multi-shuttle-bus system that have sprouted up on the grounds.  Monticello has now become a guided “experience,” where the crowds are grouped together at 15-minute intervals and ushered quickly through the house, and where even outdoors at one’s liberty a panoply of educational signage underscores every view. 

Many of the views indeed include new construction, like the demonstration slave cabin and the underground passages.  I overheard that Monticello gets half a million visitors a year, which of course requires a functioning through-put of people but at the same time reveals the big money underlying the supposedly non-profit industry of historical “reconstruction.”  Monticello is now run by something called “The Mountaintop Project,” whose signage took pains to point out that the process of “reconstructing” the site has been ongoing for a hundred years; methinks they protest too much.  Methinks also that the house was somewhat different; though I don’t necessarily trust my old memories through the veil of misty worship, I don’t remember Jefferson having so many religious paintings on the walls.

Still, the old house is as handsome as it always was.

Adventures Off, On and Up the Parkway

My journey up the Blue Ridge Parkway is complete, I’m back in the world of Internet connections, and this morning finds me in Charlottesville, VA, where I’ll be staying for the next four days.  Try as I might to amble, I’ve arrived in range of my writers’ retreat a week before it begins.  Seeing this coming, I booked an AirBnb in Charlottesville for the week, to finish needed edits to my novel and explore the area.

Charlottesville, it’s worth noting, has been in the news lately for a neo-Nazi demonstration, of all things, which led to street violence and pulled our strange, still-untested President Trump into a swirling media scandal.  All I can say, arriving in this bucolic little college town where the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, is that I wouldn’t tar a whole town for the actions of a few, but I’ll be keeping my eyes open.

On to a recap of my parkway adventures.

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It had been nice to finally pull out my tent again, assemble its poles, and spend a night camping for the first time since before entering Mexico.  There are several woodsy State Park campgrounds along the parkway, and for my first night I stayed at one called Daughton (which had me humming “The Only Living Boy in New York” as I set up the tent); it had signs posted warning of a bear in the area, and I slept a little uneasily, starting awake whenever the wind flapped the rain fly just outside my head, but otherwise I spent an unmolested night.

Not so with my next day, when I made bold to leave the parkway, and almost didn’t make it back on.

Halfway through my second day I decided to make a quick detour into the city of Roanoke, VA, to have lunch and run a few errands; afterwards I was hoping to get as far North as the “Peaks of Otter” campground.  It was a shock to leave the parkway’s quiet, scenic lanes for the truck-shrieking run on a superhighway through the billboards and strip malls of real life, but I found cheap parking in downtown Roanoke, did my errands, and went to a pleasant-looking restaurant called “Corned Beef & Co.” where I ordered the Cobb salad.

That thing gave me food poisoning the likes of which I’ve rarely had in my life.  Suffice to say that by the time I left the restaurant I was recalculating for a closer campground called “Roanoke Mountain,” even if I had to drive South, and by the time, a little later, when I got to my car, I was recalculating for the closest motel I could find.  Google Maps got me to a Days Inn four minutes away, where I parked, endured the chatty clerk who wanted to talk Miatas and India while checking me in, seemingly oblivious to my white face and propensity to bend double with pain, and made it to my allotted room just in time to run into the bathroom and be sick.

I spent the rest of that day, blurrring into night, recovering in the bed, and by morning I felt wan but better.  Being sick on the road is no fun, and when I saw that the day had dawned in a steady downpour I felt obscurely that my time on the Blue Ridge Parkway was done.

Instead I headed straight for an attraction to which I’d intended to detour later: Poplar Forest, a one-time rural retreat of Thomas Jefferson with a house designed by him.  It was a quick drive on regular roads through rainy Virginia towns and landed suburbs, and I required Google Maps to find it in its warren-like neighborhood of little streets and red-brick houses, but it’s a curious place, well worth seeing.  It does, in fact, have a handsome and characteristic octagonal house designed by Jefferson.

The attraction is fairly new, as the house is almost entirely a reconstruction: it had several owners after Jefferson who did extensive remodeling, interrupted by a fire in 1845 that gutted the whole interior, and it’s only recently that it has re-emerged in its old clothes, as it were, thanks to a non-profit corporation.  The restoration work is still going on, and workmen were hammering in the unfinished interior as we few visitors got the rainy-day tour.  We asked more questions, actually, of the workmen, who pointed out the different types of wood used for doors and tables, how they sourced the period door hardware, etc.  It was interesting to visit a half-complete restoration project, and see the skill and attention that goes into it.

But even in shell form you could see Jefferson’s whimsies, like the two-part bedroom with the bed in a wall in the middle (enabling morning access to either side), and feel his rationalist spirit in the soaring 20-foot-high central dining room, a perfect cube lit by a great skylight.  (Photography wasn’t allowed indoors.)

Afterwards I went into nearby Lynchburg with the daunting task of finding some gentle road food for my stomach.  My radar, at least, was working pretty well: I picked out a coffeehouse called the White Hart Café, found a parkingspot right outside the door, and it turned out to be a homey, friendly spot where I could order a bowl of hot oatmeal with brown sugar and bananas—the perfect meal to settle my stomach.

Thus restored, I decided to forge back onto the Blue Ridge Parkway in the late afternoon despite the rain.  I’m glad I did.  The little blue Parkway sign off the regular road ushered me back into its secret world with some its most breathtaking scenery yet, in a footbridge stroll across and along the James River made even lovelier by the damp day.

The rain had lightened when I set up my tent at the Otter Creek State Park campground, getting me only slightly wet, and I was snug and dry inside by the time it trappled down harder again.  I spent a cozy and slightly cold night (somehow it’s become Fall) with no bears, and by midnight no rain taps on my tent roof, just the chuckle of the nearby creek.

I got an early start the next morning (yesterday), and drove the rest of the Parkway, past mountain valleys throttled and foaming with rising clouds, through misty woods where opening fans of sunlight angled over the road, around spots of sun into which dripping trees rained golden coins, over airplane-high vistas of a night-green forest shaved about in half-inch-deep cutouts of clover-green farms away to the bright horizon. 

At last the sign for my exit appeared, and with a sigh I returned again to the normal world.

Farewell Blue Ridge Parkway!

Photo Essay -- The Blue Ridge Parkway: Driving Nirvana

The Blue Ridge Parkway is, quite simply, driving at its best.  I picked up the parkway at Asheville, North Carolina, on one of its little connecting turnoffs marked with a discreet sign, and at once entered another world.  There are no streetlights on the Blue Ridge Parkway, no towns, no shops, no trucks, no billboards; there is only the perfect two-lane country road curving gently through the bosom of Appalachian mountain farmland, on and on, at a steady contemplative 45 mph.  “Parkway” is the perfect word for it, as the whole experience is well-arranged: turnouts for views are solid, frequent and labeled, campgrounds and visitor centers appear regularly, various “attractions” are provided on the route like reconstructed log cabins and mills from the 19th Century.  It's a bit artificial: no matter.  The experience is the drive, and the soft hum of tires through a lace of shade on the smooth blacktop, as on the right another vista opens over the Blue Ridge mountains in oceanic pastels, and on the left a hillock meadow appears like the smooth green skin of a grape, reminds you of why we have cars in the first place.  Sometimes you have to exit the parkway and return to regular roads—for food, for gas.  You don’t want to.

As far as mountain drives go, the great quality I found in the Blue Ridge mountains was quietness.  Where the Sierra Gordo of Mexico seemed newly reared from the Earth and almost still in motion, the wooded ridges and valleys of Appalachia speak of the peace of long immobility.  These shapes are here, they seemed to say, and will be for a long time.  The range reminded me of a room of furniture put under tented green cloths for long storage.  The day of their renewed movement is not yet come.

Car note: the Blue Ridge Parkway is a dream drive for a convertible, and I’ve never seen so many out on the road.  Mustangs, BMWs, Audis, Porsches, little GM roadsters, all with their tops down and drivers’ hair blowing in the 70-degree Labor Day sunshine—plus enough Miatas to form a club.  I had a Miata conversation at one overlook with some guys who pulled their silver NB Mazdaspeed in next to me; they commiserated over my dent.  This is to say nothing of all the motorcycles—and, yes, bicycles.  You need to bring the right car to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I was glad I had one.  By Monday evening my open-air company was mostly all gone, and on Tuesday Pepin and I practically had the vistas to ourselves.

It was nice to set up my tent and camp again!

My campground, at Daughton State Park, in the morning

The Mabry Mill, one of the Parkway attractions

Heading Off the Grid

This morning I'm in a supermarket Starbucks on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina, about to begin the Blue Ridge Parkway portion of my drive.  And so a heads-up: from what I've been able to gather about the scenic little byway that wends through scenic little towns, this may be the last Internet connection I see for a while.  I'll be on the Parkway for several days (I don't know exactly how many, or how far I'll get per day), and the idea is to stay at campgrounds along the way, so it's possible that the blog will be staticky at best for a good while.  I'll check in when and as I can.

Yesterday was a betwixt-and-between day; I should know better than to let those into my schedule.  My task was a simple one: get from Nashville to Asheville, explore Asheville, possibly start a little ways onto the Parkway, find a campground.  It didn't quite go like that.

It was a weird feeling heading out from Nashville without a bed or even a town lined up for the night ahead: I haven't done that since the early days of my trip before crossing into Mexico.  Still, I remembered that it was pretty easy to find campgrounds.  It was a beautiful day with a cloudless blue sky; for the sake of efficiency I jumped on the highway, but even the Interstate threw in some glorious sweeping curves through the rising foothills of the Appalachians.  When I got off on Route 25 through the National Forest and crossed into North Carolina the land got even prettier.

My first check came in the town of Hot Springs, NC, where I'd planned to stop at the spa and enjoy a mineral hot tub soak; apparently you can book those by the hour.  But on a Memorial Day Sunday the parkinglot, and the tubs, were full.  Oh, well.  I drove on, but I'd been looking forward to the driving break, and unalleviated fatigue was catching up to me as I pulled into the charming town of Asheville and started nosing around for a place to get coffee and dinner.

Asheville really was a charming-looking town: cute, collegiate, walkable, with scenic views and attractive restaurants at every turn.  To make a long story short, I never got out of my car.  I spent 45 minutes driving around that town looking for parking, with no luck.  Even the pay garages were full.  On one street, I found a garage on my left with a digital counter showing five open spaces, and as I waited to turn, all five cars in the oncoming lane turned and went into the garage.

Achey, spacy, hungry, angry, and in general suffering a mood that wouldn't be reported in the blog if future Internet connections were assured to overwrite it with forthcoming better ones, I delivered a decisive and not-so-fond farewell to Asheville and jumped on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

By now it was unfairly close to 6:00 pm (I'd lost an hour crossing a time line), the sun was low, and the nearest campground North per my map was a long distance.  There was a closer one South, but right at hand was a Visitor Center, and I pulled in there.  In the last few minutes before it closed I called the Southern campground and asked if they had an open tent space; the woman said they had exactly one, but she couldn't reserve it, it was first come first serve.

At that point I gave up and found a local Motel 6.  It was $80, the most expensive one of my trip, and after a swim in the pool my door card didn't work, and while other Motel 6's had free wi-fi this one charged for it, which I declined to do.  I had a heavy roadside dinner at the Waffle House across the street, learned from a phone message that Walter Becker had died, and went to bed.

It was that kind of a day.

But during my brief dash on the Blue Ridge Parkway, it looked gorgeous.  Today I'm off to try it for real.  And if you don't hear from me, assume I had a wonderful day!

Nashville

My first day in Nashville was grey and wet with a solid, steady rain, but that was all right: I was hanging out with my old friends Andy and Ginger Coffey.

Well, Andy’s an old friend dating back to my rock-and-roll days in Chicago when we were bandmates whooping it up in such raucous fly-by-night concoctions as Rodeo Riot.  His wife Ginger I was meeting for only the second time, but she’s so easy-going, and the two of them are such a happy unit, that I felt I’d been friends with her for years.  I’d picked a Motel 6 near their house, in the “Hickory Bend” suburb near the airport, and after having lunch at a big roadside touristy gift-shop place called the Cracker Barrel I drove on over.

Andy and Ginger have a well-tended red-brick ranch house in a neighborhood of the same, with a garden out front and three energetic dogs within, and a back room sporting—yes!—a couple of drumsets.  Not THAT much water under the bridge, then, despite Andy’s recent cataract surgery and other hints of middle age, and within a few beers of my arrival he I were in the back room crashing through a jam session that made me a person of suspicion to the dogs for the rest of my visit.  The couple then treated me to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.

 I think I remember how to play these

The next day Hurricane Harvey finally packed up its remnants and cleared out, and it was a warm sunny Saturday to explore downtown Nashville. 

It was interesting to contrast Memphis and Nashville, neighboring Tennessee music cities.  In both cases I walked a special music district downtown and went to a museum.  But where Memphis had a soft, venerable, half-ruined feel, carrying the scars of its history even to its motel museum and its old musicians pushing CDs on Beale, I found Nashville to be too shiny and corporate.  Maybe it’s the difference between blues and country.  The Nashville music district on Broadway (called “The District”) is center stage to a Brobdingnagian urban renewal of enormous glass skyscrapers, stadiums, modernist event halls, wide boulevards, riverfront parks, all new and gleaming, through which the strip of music clubs functions like a theme street in Disneyworld complete with horse-drawn Cinderella carriages and pedaled party-carts full of singing beer-drinking girls going by.  It was enormously popular on this Saturday afternoon, the streets mobbed and the stacked balconies of all the clubs filled with bright faces.  I did squeeze for a while into one of the crowded clubs to listen to a live four-piece country band belt out some rockin just-add-water numbers about love and trucks, but the waitress hadn’t noticed me by the time the set ended, so I left.

I also went to the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum, which, after all, is a completely unfair thing to compare with the National Civil Rights Museum.  It’s not its fault if its subject is by definition an exercise in self-congratulatory promotion.  For what it is, the Hall of Fame museum is quite good: you come in through a huge atrium complete with restaurants, and walk long halls full of old instruments, stage clothes, lyric sheets, fancified cars (they have Elvis’ Cadillac and the Trans Am from “Smokey and the Bandit II”), and other memorabilia showcasing both the glitz and the work of show business.  Very well done was the audio: it’s a music museum, and the ways they isolated the sound specific to an exhibit—for example a video of Depression-era banjo-picking footage, or a booth where you can dial up famous hits featuring a given session man—worked perfectly, enabling you to move from one aural area to another in a constant flow but with no overlap. 

    Loretta Lynn's dress

Elvis' car

They do have a rotunda for the actual Hall of Fame, with bronze plaques for the likes of Glen Campbell and Tex Ritter, and overall this non-Country fan was surprised to find the extent to which his genes were already imbued with the music.  From Johnny Cash to Tanya Tucker to Loretta Lynn to Steve Earle, I more or less knew my way.  Country music is in fact an all-American story, and while the museum had much more information than I’d known or needed, it’s a story that somehow included me too.

Still, it was $18.00 to park downtown.  Nashville. 

Andy and Ginger were supposed to join me in the afternoon but they never got out of the house, so I went back to them, for one more jam session in the back room and a wonderful dinner out at a Mexican restaurant, with Margaritas on the patio by the grassy hill as the sun set in the blue sky.