Love Letter to the Friendly City
“You have a bad habit of not appreciating a place until you’ve left it,” my wife said recently as we drove to dinner. My lips moved to muster a defense and immediately stopped. My mind flashed to the many moves we had made over our marriage: how I didn’t really appreciate Louisiana until I had moved back to Georgia, Atlanta until we had moved to Tifton, and, now, Tifton once we had moved to Colorado. But surely that wasn’t exactly right. I loved Tifton too, in my own way. I started to speak. She cut me off, “You said you didn’t want to die there, remember?”
It was true. I had said that exact thing. I remember driving past Oak Ridge Cemetery one afternoon and putting words to that thought as my eyes searched for the top of the hill and where the headstones ended.
But there were other thoughts too. I reminded her of how I would always remark how beautiful it was when, finally far enough south of Macon, the interstate dropped back down to two lanes, the fields spread out beyond our windshield in a gentle palette, and my back would unknot. I reminded her of how we both always noted the exhale of relief of seeing our garage door lift and the light spill out into the night. That feeling only happens when you think of a place as home.
There were the days we spent as a family enjoying the museum’s steam train: our best days. I came to tell friends that it was the kid growing up in Atlanta that I pitied. My children would spend Saturdays blowing the train whistle, riding across the park with my hand draped across their chest as the only safety restraint, ping-ponging between grinding corn to feed the chickens, visiting the mules, setting the mill to grinding before stopping to have a biscuit on the porch swing of one of the ancient houses. When the day was over and we stood at the station waiting for the train to return us to the world, I remember surveying the grounds in one long pan (I remember it as autumn) and feeling lucky that my life had brought me to Tifton.
On the day that I learned I would be leaving Tifton, I was serving jury duty in Judge Reinhardt’s courtroom. Five years earlier- a few days after I moved to Tifton- I was sitting in his brother’s pick-up truck, having been motioned in when I had mentioned that I didn’t know where to recycle all the moving boxes now littering our little rental house. After showing me how to find the recycling center, we stopped for hotdogs and softserve ice cream at Shady Lane. Driving back to the house, he motioned out of his window with his cigar and said, “This is a nice place to live.”
Back in Judge Reinhardt’s courtroom we had reached that part in the day when the Judge had to retire to his chambers with a handful of potential jurors to explain that, no, he wasn’t asking them to judge a man in the “biblical sense,” but only his guilt or innocence. They would return, eventually, looking perceptibly abashed. In the interim, the men nearby struck up a conversation with me when they heard me explain that I taught at the local college. They both told me stories about how their children or their friend’s children had received a good education with us: high praise in the South, where Liberal Arts professors are often viewed with suspicion or subjected to outright derision.
And then one of the men began recounting the story of how, instead of college, he had spent his young adulthood working on a ranch and the day that he helped his boss with a heifer who was giving birth. It had not gone well and the calf looked like it would not survive. “He told me, ‘Son, we’ve done all we can. It’s up to the good Lord now’” he recounted. “And then I saw the mother lick the calf full up its face and down its body” he said while dragging the fingers of his upturned right palm from his left elbow down to wrist. He looked right at me and smiled wistfully, “Just then, the calf’s eye changed and it was like a light came into it.” The calf got up and walked away, he told me. I thought, “where else would I ever hear such a thing?”
Minutes later, the other man told me that he used to teach at my college, though he left in the summers to complete his doctoral work out of state. “Then they got tired of that and made me stop,” he said, “but I guess Colorado State was too far away.”
And that’s when I knew. When I walked out to the car during the lunch break, there was a voicemail waiting for me: “Dr. Brown, this is so-and-so from Colorado State, I really need to talk with you…”.
Three months later, we left Tifton in a nearly overpacked moving truck. After an intense day of packing and lifting, I climbed into the cab of the truck, waved goodbye to one of the best neighbors I’ve ever had, and drove past the homes of great friends on my way to the interstate.
Others may disagree, but I have found that you never really leave a place. Within days of arriving in Colorado, I realized that my new colleagues and friends would come to know me as Joe from south Georgia. And oddly, many of the qualities that I came to associate with Tifton are now probably my strengths they’d name if you asked. Nowhere is this more apparent than in my son, who came to Tifton when he wasn’t yet three months old. My son is marked by his south Georgia home and for that I am genuinely grateful. He is kind, because Tifton was kind to him. He isn’t afraid of people because Tifton taught him that they are decent. He smiles because he has known happiness. He loves easily because that’s what he learned in the town’s schools, churches, and homes. Tifton is the beginning- a beautiful beginning- of his story.
However, the best stories aren’t about staying home. They are about leaving; leaving because we must. But they’re also about what we bring from them to the rest of the world and, then maybe someday later, what we bring back. Maybe my wife was right in the end. That’s the tricky thing about even the most loving homes. Eventually, you have to leave them.