Georgeann Murphy

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.

A day of lucky little breaks and long-time friendships renewed, starting with a visit to the Constitution Square gift shop in search of postcards, a commodity increasingly hard to find.  Success:  I spy lots of Ephraim McDowell House cards, honoring the surgeon who performed the first abdominal surgery on Christmas morning, 1809, removing a 22.5-pound ovarian tumor from Jane Todd Crawford—without benefit of anesthetic or antisepsis. Crawford had ridden 60 miles on horseback to undergo the operation in Danville; she not only survived, but after 25 days rode back to her Green County home, and lived another 32 years.  It strikes me that both doctor and patient were lucky—and heroic. Some history one is happy to leave behind.

I am this morning the beneficiary of the gift shop attendant across the street from the McDowell house, the fellow who called my attention to a stack of old Centre College postcards he’d found in the attic featuring many different views of the College and Danville printed up for Centre’s 2019 bicentennial, including photos of Old Centre painted with the triumphan “C 6 H 0” score celebrating little Centre’s football team eating Harvard’s lunch in a 1921 contest played in Harvard Stadium before a crowd of 45,000.  That formula (“that poisoned Harvard”) remains legend at Centre.  When I inquired of the shop clerk how much he was asking for these cards, this gentleman demurred that he hadn’t yet got around to pricing them, and said:  “Just put these in your purse.”  The kindness of strangers.

My next stop was a CVS for Band-Aids, batteries, and q-tips.  While in the check-out line I encountered another exchange unlikely to have occurred north of the Mason-Dixon line:  a very polite but extended contretemps between a pharmacist pinch-hitting at the register (this CVS is yet another under-staffed establishment) and a customer trying to ascertain what, given various coupons, sales, and rewards points, she actually owed for the toilet paper she wanted to buy.  Nothing, it turned out; her purchase was free, and all parted amicably, but not before this satisfied customer apologized to me for extending my wait in line.  Extraordinary. 

Stopping at a Kroger in search of fruit for the next leg of my trip, I discovered a lovely mandevilla for sale, the very plant whose name I could not recall the previous night when it appeared in my slide of the Villa Rufolo terrace:  stroke of luck number 2.  I bought it as a gift for my gracious hosts, a small tribute to their late daughter Chiara.  From the grocery, I drove to my former home on Crosshill Road to photograph the place I’d been so proud to own—a simple, well-maintained little cape which I bought in 1987 for $58,000 and sold in 1995 for $71,000.  How antiquated those figures now seem! 

I began my tenure-track assistant professorship teaching 8 courses a year for a salary of $19,500 (including $500 for my finished dissertation), a sum which proved sufficient to buy a house three years later.  In my mind’s ear I hear Archie and Edith singing “Those Were the Days.”

From my house I drive to Centre, realizing I don’t have a nice digital photo of the place, and pull into the visitor parking lot where I am greeted by a just-graduated senior who mimes rolling down my window so he can say:  “Nice car!”  When I agree to his assessment, he points to an identical iron-blue GTI already in the lot:  HIS!  Grant, the grad, is astounded:  “I had to drive to Indiana to get mine, and I’ve never seen another one!  Hey, could I pull my car over next to yours so my brother Garrett can take our picture?”  Sure!  I let Grant know I’d once taught at Centre.  His response:  “Well, now I REALLY need that picture!”  Lucky break number 3.  Grant and I, my “Eisenblau,” and his “Victoria” pose together.

Finally finishing my errands en route back to Bobbie’s, I think to stop at my Danville apartment, the first place I, the new drama prof, lived, as my Division Chair said when introducing me at the first faculty meeting, “appropriately on Broadway!”  As I approached it, a car parked just in front pulled away, affording me just the parking place I needed to take the shot.  Lucky break 4:  batting a thousand.

Back I go to Bobbie’s, where I once again get to accompany my friend to her appointment, and have some time with her back home afterward.  We agree that professional humanists have some advantage when inevitable tragedies strike:  some critical, analytical, intellectual distance from what is happening to us.  I tell her again she modeled professorial life for me; she tells me she quoted me when speaking of how good friends always just pick up where they left off, and asks advice about the hair she has kept covered under a stylish cloche since losing most of it to cancer treatment.  Can she go out like this?  She removes the cloche, revealing a stylishly mussed cap of pure white hair.  She looks like Annie Lennox!  I give her thumbs up, she gives me a hug, and we part blowing kisses.

Back at the little house, Bill comes to fulfill two requests of mine, visits to his daughter Chiara’s grave and to what has come to be wryly known as Jurassic Park, a College-owned house providing office space for retired Centre profs.  Two sites devoted, in different ways, to the past.  The Danville cemetery is a green and pleasant place, and Chiara has an epitaph from Dante’s Paradiso. 

Bill grooms the site, and after is proud to show me the Jurassic Park office in which he so regularly, diligently works.  It’s full of books and slides, tools of art historians like my David—also a Michigan man—of another era.  One other emeritus is at work downstairs; he says he remembers me, but while I recognize his name, I don’t recognize him.  Suddenly I feel the 27 years’ distance between me and Danville.

Bill drops me at “home” to change for the dinner party Ann and Sheldon have prepared in my honor, and on joining the good company of all the friends attending, that 27 years’ distance evaporates.

There is, however, evidence of time’s passing:  Sheldon, younger than I, is retiring, and another friend, Mark, whom Bobbie and I hired years before, is gliding the staged retirement path.  Sheldon and Ann’s “baby” girl now has a baby of her own.  Their house and garden are beautiful, set in a historic neighborhood of Danville close to campus.  Ann’s table is grand, the meal delicious—perfectly roasted beef, minted potatoes, asparagus (a combo reminiscent of yesterday’s lunch), with chocolate cake and plenty of good Bordeaux.  The conversation is lively and silly, classically tipsy academic:  the topic of another colleague currently playing the professor in Uncle Vanya gives way to Schopenhauer, and then, irrationally, to the question of whether animals feel pleasure in eating—or sex, which leads to bird sex, and the size (large!) of a swan’s penis, cf. Zeus and Leda.  The hilarity in turn gives way to quieter, more intimate reconnecting after dinner, when finally the ”school night” festivity breaks up.

Again, I go to bed happy.