Tackling the Globe…

When I met Marlene, a much older author, on my trip to Brazil in the spring, she couldn’t get fathom what it must be like to hail somewhere “foreign” like Tennessee. Marlene grew up in Czechoslovakia in the 30′s, and her family fled to New York when World War II hit. I can’t blame her for being curious, but it tickled me pink to hear her questions. “I mean, your parents, what do they do for work?” (A CPA and an accountant.) “How do people get by?” (Like anywhere else on the planet, I would think. It may be the South, but we still have a need for doctors, lawyers and the like.) “What do you do for fun?” (What does anyone do for fun? I’d say we do the same as they do.) The way she’d ask these questions in awe, I could picture her envisioning my family making a morning trip to the outhouse to wash up and retrieving water from a well, carrying it back to the homestead with pails over our heads. Quite the contrary; this is where we live:

Tullahoma, the town in which I grew up, is just shy of 19,000 residents. I probably know 18,999 of them. Or rather, they know me. It’s always so embarrassing when you come back after being gone for eight years, and everyone still knows you and your business. And you don’t recognize them from Adam. I think it would be much more convenient if we all had our names tattooed on our foreheads. Or at least wore ID bracelets and went by numbers, all 1984-like.

We’re about an hour from Nashville and an hour from Chattanooga, so much of the time, we were going back and forth to one or the other, whether it was for my soccer club team, my private tennis lessons, the math state competition (yes, I was the third place champion in Calculus II in high school, thank you very much). These days, we’re best known for Arnold Air Force Base, Worth bats and Bonnaroo. Oh, and the fact that the Jack Daniels Distillery is at our doorstep. (Hey, it could be much worse. We could be famous for our R.C. Cola and Moon Pies, for one.) The town’s epicenter is our paltry mall, which coincidentally is partially owned by my father (you know you’ve hit the big time when your dad owns a shopping strip). It has one department store, and not even a good one at that — a meager Dillard’s, where I have to peruse the juniors section if I want a prayer at finding anything that I might actually wear in public. The women’s department — or “Missy” as it is indeed called in Tullahoma — is full of ugly suits and sack dresses your frumpy Aunt Mildred wouldn’t even dare put on her body. At least there’s a Clinique counter, so the Junior League ladies don’t have to attend meetings looking like their two year old did their make-up. The other stores that fill the empty corridors are Claire’s, Foot Locker, J.C. Penney’s, and a fairly nice jewelry store. It was an exciting day month year in Tullahoma when the Bath & Body Works opened up while I was in high school. The line wound out the door for weeks. There’s now a boutique or two scattered in other areas of town, and Marti & Liz, a designer resale shoe store, always seems to have a fair amount of business.

There aren’t duplicates of anything in town, except for Sonic and Hardee’s. You can’t get coffee anywhere after 9am, except for at gas stations and Waffle House. SVV and I had this very problem when we went to Bonnaroo in ’07. We “slept in” to 9:30, and just like that, our chance at a cup of joe was gone, gone, gone. If you want Starbucks, you have to drive closer to the Interstate — to exit 114 on I-24 to be precise. When you want to celebrate, you go to Ruby Tuesday’s, Red Lobster or Applebee’s. (For this very reason, you’ll never find me at any of these establishments.) If it’s a special occasion, you drive the 15 minutes to Manchester to O’Charley’s or Cracker Barrel. If it’s a really special occasion, you go to the sole French eatery, Emil’s, for a meal that would probably fall under the inexpensive spectrum in San Francisco.

For fun when I was a teen, we’d got to Wal-Mart — Super Wal-Mart, actually. I only wish I were kidding. That or “cruise the strip,” the mile-and-a-half stretch down Jackson Street between the two Sonics. We didn’t pick up boys, we didn’t cause trouble, we just drove — back and forth, back and forth, in my friend Cindy’s antiquated black Civic. Of course, I didn’t have a drop of alcohol until I was 17, so I should add this is what the “good kids” did for fun. The others — the 99% of my town — had campouts and boozefests out in the woods. There are a lot of woods in the Greater Tullahoma Area. There was probably a lot of nookie that went on in said woods; I, however, would not know (ignorance is bliss). I finally attended my first “campout” when I was 17. It was two days before the regional tennis final, and I went with my friend and teammate Eric, who I had a huge crush on at the time. I consumed half a Jack Daniels and Sun-Drop (as in half a drink, not half a bottle). The hangover didn’t subside for days. Needless to say, I lost the match and forfeited my spot at state that year. My mom wasn’t too pleased.

I did work for the local paper on some level from high school on. I interned there in college and was writing and photographing the whole front page by the time I was 20. Then, the editor asked me to write a weekly Sunday column for the Op-Ed page. It could be about whatever I wanted, but I naturally wrote about travel. I was living in Europe at the time, so it became my journal, my blog or sorts, only before I knew such things existed and available in print form to the entire public. I started getting fan mail and my mom received all sorts of calls and letters with my clips attached. I think the people liked reading about something other than local board meetings, food drives and the weekly crimelog (in such a small place, you always knew everyone who appeared in the criminal pages). I was writing the column gratis, but eventually the EIC pulled it without telling me and I didn’t even know until months later when my mom asked why I had stopped writing. I hadn’t; I’d still been sending Bob a 1,500-word story each and every week, no matter in what far-flung place I was currently located. (In Corsica and Morroco, in particular, Internet access was not easy to come by. But yet, I persevered.) This was nearly three years ago. Every time I’m at home, people still say, “I just love your column so much. I read it every week!” I don’t have the heart to tell them that, well, it’s not actually in there anymore…and hasn’t been since early 2006!

It’s weird, having everyone know your business. Even without the column, coming home only three times a year and living 3,000 miles away out in the Land of the Damn Liberals (not to be confused with the Land of the Dam Yankees in which I previously resided), you can’t keep secrets. My mom and I went for our ritual mani-pedis at Ultra Nails, and a woman whose children were a bit older than me in school walked in. “Kristin! How’d your Lasik surgery go?” I hadn’t seen her in years. Living in Tullahoma is like being a participant in one ongoing game of Telephone.

Other times, the everyone-knowing-you facet isn’t such a good thing. Take, for example, going to the pharmacy. Luckily, I’ve never been the victim of some embarrassing ailment, but I did have to pick up an antibiotic for a sinus infection last week and wanted to inquire if it would interfere with, erm, other daily medicines I may take, if you get my drift. Fortunately, I’d never seen the pharmacist handling my order before. When I voiced my concern, she said she didn’t know and would have to ask someone more knowledgeable on the issue. She called the head pharmacist, who happened to be a former neighbor and the mother of a guy I knew very well growing up. The other pharmacist relayed the question to Carol, who in turn said, “depends on how much of a risk you want to take…but then again, you’ve always been quite the risktaker, haven’t you!” winking at me. I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. This may not seem like a big deal to you West Coasters, but where I come from, if you don’t have a ring, there’s to be no hanky-panky. Don’t even get me started on how I’m not to mention SVV and my living situation. In fact, I’m seen as sort of a nut bag in these parts. Together three years and no talk of marriage? In Southern mindset, we should have been heading to the altar two-and-a-half years ago.

It’s also a very political place. You can’t have a dinner party and invite Billy Sue and her husband without having Bobby Mae and her spouse over, as well. This is why weddings here are such an ordeal. In California, my friends deem a 100-person affair “big.” In Tullahoma, it’s not out of the ordinary to have 800 guests in attendance.

The majority of friends I grew up with, I no longer speak to. This isn’t because of a falling out, because so-and-so stole my boyfriend when we were 15. But people in these parts, they stay put. I’d say 90% of my graduating class still reside in a 50-mile radius in Middle Tennessee. Many are married and have kids already; some are even on their second marriages. What I’m trying to illustrate is that we’re on completely different pages of our lives. When I come back to visit, we have nothing to say to one another. I don’t know what it’s like to have essentially never left home; they can’t relate to my globetrotting. Many of them don’t even possess passports and can’t fathom why I’d possibly want to be as mobile as I am. I think they all assume I’ll wind up back in Tullahoma one day (never going to happen), that I’m just getting it all out of my system. So, a handful of BFFs aside, I socialize as little as possible. Which means I can’t leave my house, as I’m bound to run into five people I know even if I’m just making a trip down the block to the gas station.

For all the dissenting things I can say about Tullahoma (and I don’t mean them as such), I will admit this: It’s an excellent place to raise a family. The school system is one of the top in the state, many of the town’s athletes go on to play college ball and sometimes even pro, the people would bend over backward to help you in a time of need. There’s something to be said for such a close-knit community where everyone has your back (especially when wrongfully arrested and the DA pulls strings to keep it off your record…not that I would know anything about that!). And it’s odd how you just fall back into that mold after being home for such a short period of time.

What’s your hometown like? Can anyone relate to the challenges of small-town life?