My last stop in Danville is breakfast at The Early Bird:  avocado toast with poached egg—a combo unheard of in the Danville of my first acquaintance in 1984, when even fresh seafood was impossible to get and dry Boyle County necessitated planning way ahead to buy anything alcoholic.

I head south on 127, the route I used to take to see my mom in Hendersonville NC and my then-boyfriend in New Orleans, but soon branch west on the unfamiliar route Tennessee 111 toward Chattanooga and a reunion with friends of my undergraduate days: Pete, in 1973 a new drama professor at Furman University, and Karen, a suite-mate from my senior year when nine of us women enjoyed the privilege of sharing the apartment above the campus dining hall, liberated from the strictures of life in the women’s dorm.  It was the era of streaking, and I recall our stealthy examination of the boys who gathered one evening below by the dining hall loading dock to disrobe before their naked run, blithely unaware that we feminist voyeurs were on the dining hall roof watching them.  (Were there nine of us girls?  I remember Leta, Alice, and I slept in single beds side-by-side in a makeshift bedroom, our narrow berths divided from the rest of the room by clothes racks. One suite-mate, a biology major, had a pet hog snake that I put to very good dramatic use in our final theatre history project, an environmental staging of The Bacchae in the creek bed of the Furman arboretum.  Ah, youth!)

Senior year was my “breakout” year in theatre, when, having taking his acting class the year before, I twice played the wife of Pete’s character in two Furman productions, first Sarah in J.B. and then Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night: a very big deal for this undergrad. In between, Pete cast me as Lady Bracknell in his production of The Importance of Being Earnest.  The rehearsing, playing, and hilarity of Wilde’s brilliant Earnest—perhaps the funniest play ever written–remains to this day a signal highlight of my life, and the source of long-enduring friendships, my friend Jimmy’s (Algernon) career as a professional comedian, and the long and happy marriage of Karen (Cecily) and Pete.  Quite a time, that senior year 1973-74:  lots of yearning desire, requited and not, among our little crowd.

Pete left Furman to join the faculty at Sewanee, where on the 13,000-acre campus—known as “The Domain”–they raised their boys while Karen pursued her career as an intuitive, creative, dedicated elementary school teacher.  Lucky the students in her charge.  Karen’s now retired, and Pete, too, as of 2021—one year after I, who had been his undergraduate student, retired!  I realize our seven-and-change years’ age difference means much less now than it did then.  Do time and experience collapse with age as we all approach our common end?  It is strange—and interesting—to be a retired professor still hoping to impress the professor from whom I learned so much.

These musings of les temps perdus keep me occupied on the drive up until I reach the great Sequatchie Valley of Tennessee, where again the lush majesty of the landscape diverts and I reprise my rendition of Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” 

Bladder urgently requiring relief, I finally arrive at Pete and Karen’s lovely home tucked into the Tennessee mountainside and designed to make the most of its woodland setting.

Any awkwardness I might have anticipated about being so long apart but having immediately to bolt for the loo vanished instantly on our first greeting.  How good to see them both!  After a tour of the house and my guest quarters in what had been their now-grown son Brian’s room, they treat me to dinner in downtown Chattanooga at the Public House, where the first course is deliciously down home:  pimento cheese and fried pickles, followed by brook trout and key lime pie.  Back at home we argue amiably about “lazy” directors and the (according to Pete) overrated Hamilton and The Book of Mormon before retiring, well fed, to bed.