Why I'm still here

And why I’m not alone

I finally took the social networking plunge. I depend daily on Internet searches and email, and obtain most of my news about the world online. Like many people, I haven’t opened a paper phone book in years. I order videos from NetFlix, and watch my favorite TV shows online. And I blog. Of course I blog. Still, I’ve long been hesitant to throw my social fortunes to the winds of MySpace and FaceBook.

In connecting with old friends from high school, the first topic that comes up is often geography. Many of my schoolmates – especially those who showed great promise – have moved to Atlanta or some far-off metropolis to pursue a successful career. Economists and sociologists tell us to expect as much. Bedroom communities like Ringgold, Georgia, simply do not retain most of the talented young people who graduate from their schools. They go off to college and discover they have outgrown their own community. The place they called home does not offer employment opportunities that stimulate their interests and allow them to access (and afford) the lifestyle they became accustomed to at the university.

What is it, then, that holds some of us here when it would seem a relief to pack it up and move away? Some, perhaps, lack motivation. Most of us are just sentimental.

It is that curve in Chickamauga Creek that holds me, like a mother restraining a baby in the crook of her arm. I drive past it more often than not, failing to leave the comfort of my vehicle and my shoes and my dignity. I pledge to stop more often and stand on those wide, flat stones while the ice-cold water runs over the tops of my bare feet – all the while praying the moss doesn’t glide beneath my soles like a banana peel and send me flying backward to land in a splash of green water and lost dignity.

The train, too, holds me here rather than moving me on. I love to hear it thunder past the Depot on an opry night, the great wooden shutter doors trembling in their ancient track. Sometimes the musicians join the rhythm; other times they stop and listen to a mournful solo as the horn blows and the beast moves by. I place my hand flat against the stone walls and feel the pulse of that locomotive roaring northward only a few feet from my fingertips, moving us without taking us away.

I love the old things, like that hodge-podge of tin and wood over by Callaway’s store. I have been looking at that structure my whole life, and it occupies the frame of my existence. Business may take me to the shiny, neoclassic city hall, but my eye is always on that crazy quilt of tin sheets. I’m remembering a hundred indistinguishable Saturdays when my father backed up to their pickup-height loading dock, and familiar men with friendly faces tossed sweet corn into the back of our old Dodge while I went inside to ask a question about my horse or my lamb or my dog.

Yes, it’s really the people who keep me here. I do not want to live in a place where there is no one like Moses in the grocery store. He grins, golden tooth gleaming, and you know right away that a flame burns so brightly in his soul that it could never be snuffed out by bad weather or a squeaky grocery cart wheel. He sings his way through life, blessing everyone who comes near him with what he enthusiastically calls his “black magic.” Just watch sometime and see the shoppers walking into the grocery store tired, cranky and worried about what to make for dinner – then coming out with a lighter step despite the heavy sacks in their hands. Moses is not a bag boy or a grocery worker; he’s the town healer.

My family, too, is here. If I moved away, they would cook me sumptuous dinners on those holidays I breezed in from some far-away metropolis. But who would pick up popsicles and ginger ale when I am sick? Who would teach my son the patient care of tending tomatoes and rounding up cows? What would it mean to him, growing up without the pungent Georgia clay inside the grooves of his soccer cleats?

I suppose we could live someplace exciting. My five-year-old always prays “I wish we lived on the beach and never got sick.” Yet if we did, she would not know the way that wide green creek meanders lazily past our yard, and then ruffles into a hundred giggles before it disappears past the island. I could show her a picture, but somehow it just wouldn’t be the same.



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