People, places, dreams mark journey
ISSUE: 05/01/07 > OPINION > People, places, dreams mark journey
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Henry Nichols, Vision editor, is a senior journalism major. |
Though a native Texan, I’ve spent most of my life in Music City. I went to Sunday school here, I went to prom here, I got thrown out of Little League games here.
My parents met on a double date as Vanderbilt undergrads and decided to return to Nashville from Houston as young married parents when I was four. Over the next 13 years as my dad’s law practice took off, our residence route gradually moved closer to Brentwood from Bellevue.
Since I returned to Nashville from the Left Coast in 2004, I resumed moving closer to the heart of town, settling in residences around Belmont after being kicked out of my Brentwood nest. While I wouldn’t yet call myself a man, I certainly have felt closer to that distinction than ever before.
I recently had the honor of representing the university as a student panelist probing candidates at Belmont’s mayoral forum in MPAC. I listened intently as some other men who have grown up in Nashville such as Bob Clement, Buck Dozier and Howard Gentry pleaded with our student constituency to stay in Nashville after graduation and promised to help foster our community by making it an easier, more attractive place to live.
I’m sure that many music business majors here don’t need to hear anyone pontificate about the benefits of living near Music Row, but for a rising journalist who has lived in the same town for 17 years, I may need a bit of a stronger appeal. I would like to stay around Hillsboro Village as I celebrate my financial independence, but taxes and property values continue to skyrocket.
Brentwood? Franklin? Too many bad childhood memories and high school ties that I’m likely to keep running into at bars as I try to unwind from a hard day’s work.
Columbia? Mt. Juliet? Too rural for my taste.
Bellevue? West Nashville? Too sketchy.
East Nashville? Please … when I can master an appropriate sleep schedule and cook my own food, then maybe I’ll worry about revamping some house.
And when I finally dupe some poor, innocent beauty into taking care of me and spawning my progeny, what then? I’m the same age, 23, as my parents were when they married and I’m still a frat boy at heart who has his mom do his laundry. I’ll need an even more comfortable place to rear a family when a glass of Merlot and a plate of penne over “Rome” re-runs constitutes a “wild night.”
Right now I can already see the light at the end of the tunnel I’ve been in for the past 17 years, and it’s both scary and exciting. I’ve already gotten a taste of travel and adventure in my life and my heart aches for more.
I yearn to return to Europe for love and self-discovery. I want to move to Austin, Texas, to launch a filmmaking career. I want to settle in Chicago near close friends and big city culture and I can’t wait to cover sports in Miami Vice. I have so much I’m searching for and I need to find sea legs outside my comfort zone.
But even as my grand visions and dreams invigorate my desires to move on, I look around and see all the people and relationships I’m leaving behind and it pains me. If I had only played Madden with Michael one more time, if I had only mustered the courage to ask Lisa out for coffee.
As I loiter at Dead Day parties and laugh with friends, The Beatles could cue the epilogue to a charmed chapter that will soon be in the rearview mirror:
“There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed,
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places had their moments,
With lovers and friends I still can recall,
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I’ve loved them all.”
Life and love may mean adventure, pain, sacrifice and compromise, but in my life, no matter how far I roam, I will always keep returning to Nashville, my heart, my home.
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