July 7, 2021
Those of you who have read my most recent entries know that I am living in luxury at my Aunt Linda’s Corryton, TN condominium after urban boondocking across the United States visiting all my hometowns. I only have Winchester, TN and Sewanee, TN left to visit. Most likely I will continue my journey to those places sometime next week, visit nearby family and then return to Corryton for more family visiting before returning West.
Right now I am of the mind to return to Denton, Texas on the way back across the country and try to find the old Shady Oaks Ranch or the space it once occupied. I have a lead on where it may be from a woman who returned my call. On a message she left to me on my phone she said she used to go there with her Girl Scout Day Camp but that if it is the place she is thinking of “it has been gone a long, long time.”
At the moment I’m very close to the kernel of my existence. Winchester is where I was born. It’s about 3 hours east. However, Knoxville is where my parents met going to school at the University of Tennessee. That’s just 25 minutes away. Dad was a Knoxville native; mom from Winchester. A secret that came out after dad died was that he had been engaged to marry another UT faculty child like himself, but he called off the wedding the night before and got one of his brothers to drive him directly to Winchester to see my mother. According to my source, he had felt that he didn’t have much in common with the woman he was engaged to and that it had felt almost arranged—like it was an inevitable expectation that developed after they began dating.
I’m sure my mother’s rebellious spirit felt exciting, perhaps almost exotic to him. Dad was an eagle scout and youth minister. Mom, who had it in her nature to challenge everything, may have been the yin to his yang.
Maybe when he broke up with his bride-to-be he had in mind the Everly Brothers, that duo that rose to stardom in 1957 with Bye-Bye Love. He went to West High School with them and not too many years before, one of the brothers (Don probably) slashed his tires and stole the date he had taken to a school dance.
Spotty West Goes East 