“Truth be told, all roads lead to Nashville.” – Tony Lucca, from his song, “Nashville”
Well, if the truth actually be told, the saying is “all roads lead to Rome”—at least for the past thousand years give or take a few decades. But “all roads” also apparently lead to a winning marketing slogan that a Google image search shows has been used to sell just about everything: colleges and conferences, restaurants and vacation spots. I even saw one that said all roads lead to a jail in Santa Ana, which seems unfortunate on many levels.
But the Nashville version isn’t that far-fetched given my experience so far.
This is our fourth state of residence, and our Nashville experience has been wonderfully confusing since friends from Arkansas live here now, as do friends from Mississippi, as do friends from California, too. We have loved catching up with so many wonderful people, but it has quite literally produced significant disorientation, a sort of memory and relationship whiplash. It feels less like catching up and more like spinning around in circles and then struggling to walk a straight line. Where am I now? And why are people from all phases of my random life all living here, too?
I anticipated moments of self-discovery in this move. We moved 500 miles away in 1999 and then 2,000 miles away in 2008—surely a move back to within 250 miles of where we started would create some significant introspection. I believe it has, and will, but I expected the self-discovery to occur in the occasional nostalgic epiphany, not through a fog of discombobulation.
I don’t really know where all roads lead, but mine has led here, and so far it has been both perplexing and good.
I sat in the rocking chair on our front porch to finish Joyce’s Dubliners and propped a foot up on the post, a picture of serenity on a late and sticky Tennessee summer evening. But I confess that the picture was deceiving.
Starting to Look Up 