If all goes according to plan, I'll be having my surgery on Friday. (The surgery I told you about here, and also here.) I’m relieved and excited and nervous. But I’m also deeply grateful that I’m in a position to be nervous about having the surgery instead of scared about not having it.
This whole experience has been grueling, and I have been very angry for a long time. The knowledge that I was having to wait for a surgery that I need because a lot of people in this state don’t uphold the basic social contract of being a good neighbor and haven’t been vaccinated from COVID has been hard to accept.
How are you supposed to be in community with people who don’t care enough about you to do a free thing that takes 15 minutes? Like, just how far does this attitude carry? These people who don't get vaccinated, would they refuse to call 911 if their neighbor’s house was on fire because they don’t trust the government or don’t believe in government services? If they were at the grocery store and they heard a guy talking about coming to kick my ass, would they try to stop the dude? Would they call and warn me? Like, your neighbors don’t have to be your best friends or anything, but there’s kind of an expectation that they’ll not make your life harder.
I was really questioning my commitment to this whole human race thing.
But here’s what happened. People reached out to me. Friends and family, sure. But also just y’all. People who know me only through my writing. Even Scene Advice King Chris Crofton’s readers reached out to me and offered to help. People who didn’t know me, didn’t even know my writing, just wanted to offer help because I matter to someone who matters to them. And when it got to the point where I couldn’t breathe well enough to walk my dog, a whole Kindness Brigade emerged from seemingly everywhere and showed up to walk him. The effort was spearheaded by Kristin Whittlesey and Beth Downey, and I’ve been getting texted a schedule of who’s going to show up when. It’s been Scene people and former Scene people (if there can actually be such a thing), neighbors, artists, famous writers, even an Episcopal priest.
These folks spend a little time every once in a while with my ridiculously charming dog. It’s nice and fun, and I’m sure they are happy to do it and then don’t think about it much, but every time someone shows up, it makes me cry because it means so much to me. This whole situation was bad enough, but feeling like it was causing me to fail my dog was just unbearable. And now it’s not a problem because people in my community stepped in to do what I can’t at the moment. I feel so loved.
And I love you too, Nashville. I know it’s been a hard week — the possible loss of the Hermitage Cafe, as well as of Mercy Lounge, The High Watt and Cannery Ballroom ... it's a lot. It feels perhaps more than ever like we’re losing some vital piece of what makes this city a place we love. But truthfully, it’s kind of a Nashville tradition. It's how I can tell you that, in order to get to the Pancake Pantry from downtown, you’re going to need to go past where the IHOP used to be, and you’ll see where the Wendy’s was, and keep going and when you see where Sportsman’s was, start looking to your left, and everyone who’s lived here for a while knows exactly what those directions mean. We lose things. It’s a part of our civic character at this point.
But this is a thing I know, and I know it thanks to the opportunities I’ve gotten because of the Scene: Nothing in Nashville is so lost that traces of it can’t still be found. And Nashville isn’t just the buildings. It’s us. The folks who show up for each other.
I’m not really worried anymore about how I’m going to be a good neighbor to folks in a state full of people with their heads up their butts. Who cares? It’s one thing to be nice to someone; it’s another thing to have to mount a huge PR campaign so that they’ll accept it when you’re nice to them. I don’t have the time or the energy for that.
Instead, I’m interested in how I can be a better neighbor to you all, the people who show up and do the work of caring about each other. That’s what Nashville is, for me. And that’s what I want to work on preserving for as long as we can.
