Thursday, June 16, 2005

You Are So Nashville If...

About 10 years ago or so my friends and I began the lugubrious lament of how much we hated Nashville. I had been living in Nashville about 15 or so years at the time and had experienced the most formative years of my life there, including an awesome high school experience at the newly created magnet school, Hume-Fogg Academic. Yet, come 1994, life in Nashville had gotten mundane, even depressing. Several of my friends had gotten beaten up after the alternative music boom of the late 80s/early 90s, and had moved elsewhere to make music. Nashville seemed to be a dead city - full of depressed artists, musicians, and writers (well, at least the ones that I knew). It was a city that had killed a blossoming alternative scene repeatedly, lost its symphony once, had no real museum to speak of (I am sorry, but the museum in TPAC really didn't count), and had a mediocre library. Nashville lacked character - it had no spirit and no culture, unless you wanted to call country music, Opryland, and a few historic sites culture (I didn't).

So we all had our dreams of moving away, to real cities, with museums and libraries and symphonies that would never lose funding. For a long time I had my eye set on Baltimore. But here's the thing - I could never manage to go. I had even come across a couple of job opportunites, good ones, in Baltimore. I had family in and around the Baltimore area. Yet I couldn't manage to get my shit together enough to make that leap, to move on. My friends that did manage to escape only ended up returning a few years later, as if some long, bony hand had reached out from the depths of the city and pulled them back in. We called it the Nashville Curse, and had become resigned to our fates, building comfortable little lives for ourselves in this City That We Hated. I learned nonchalance when it came to the city. I cared nothing about its news or its life. I lived in Nashville, but I ignored its existence.

So time went on. The Nashville Symphony grew strong under the direction of Kenneth Schermerhorn, who even managed to win a few Grammy awards. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts opened in place of the old Nashville post office downtown. The downtown library got a new location and a fancy new architectural design. The Tennessee Titans moved to town. Old neighborhoods got makeovers and became hotspots. I've even heard that the alternative music scene has picked up life again.

In the middle of this phoenix of a city rising from the ashes, my opportunity came. I married a Greek man and moved to Greece. Soon after I moved to Greece, something happened. I began checking the Tennessean online every day for news from Music City. Then I started reading the Nashville Scene. Finally, I discovered a world of Nashville bloggers I never knew had existed before, like Brittney, Aunt B., Busymom, and the Saucy Librarian. Now I could watch the City I Had Once Hated like a hawk, watching the changes, the successes, the failures. And then I realized something. I still consider myself a Nashvillian. Not just because the government of the United States of America still considers me a Nashvillian for voting purposes, but because in my heart I am still a Nashvillian. I wear it proudly now, the good and the bad. And I still have the accent to prove it.

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