January 2, 2025
As I write this, I’m in a hotel room in Athens, Georgia, a stone’s throw from the University of Georgia’s main campus. Tomorrow morning, I’m meeting with an archivist who works with the huge media library over here, hoping to get guidance on some projects that some associates and I have in the works.
The fact I’m over here on business makes this visit an exception. Most of the time, I’m over here for my own purposes. Many times it’s been to visit my friend Bobby, who now lives just a short drive from downtown. Other times, though, I’m over here to chase some ghosts. And every time I come over here, there are that many more ghosts to chase.
Once upon a time I wanted to live here. For some reason, I decided during the first half of my junior year that I wanted to go on to graduate school. I’m not sure I knew why. I think a friend and I had talked about it, and I wanted in, especially since it would give me a chance to get out of the nest. I still remember the night I told my mother, as we browsed in the housewares section of a massive hardware store during a particularly enjoyable shopping trip a couple weekends before Christmas. I started planning from there.
There were several universities on my mind. The most obvious was the University of South Carolina. I mean, it was right there in the middle of my home state. However, my mentor and unofficial adviser at Lander told me that going to my home state’s university for graduate work could confine my prospects. He said I should expand my horizons, and suggested Vanderbilt and Wright State, among others. Intrigued, I sent away for information and added those to the roster.
But somehow my heart got set on the University of Georgia. Location had a lot to do with it. I knew of Athens, and my dad often listened to a country station from there (WNGC, which provided us with our weekly dose of “Leonard’s Losers” – get me outta here, Percy!), but had never been there. It was far enough away for me to have independence (important, given that I was spending my college years still living at home, with most every move benevolently but still carefully watched by my parents, if not the whole tiny town) and yet not too far away. And, to be honest, the town’s reputation as a haven for independent types, artists and oddballs appealed to me. Now, granted, the Athens of the mid-’90s was nothing like the Athens of those not-so-long-ago days that spawned R.E.M. and any number of others, but it still appealed to me.
So, plans got made. I started getting things lined up, taking the Graduate Record Exam and having my scores sent to the appropriate places, getting applications in before deadline. And in the summer of 1995, not long after I graduated, my mother and I drove over to Athens for the day, just to look around town. It was a long drive through rolling hills and beautiful countrysides before we got to this odd city that seemed to be on top of a hill. We parked and wandered around, going into quirky little shops, stopping in an art gallery where several photographers (including Michael Stipe) had their works on display, having lunch at a neat sandwich shop across from the university campus. We went over to campus and I spent an hour or so in the massive stacks of the library, making photocopies (remember those?) of sections of books that I never knew existed, on topics that fascinated me. I couldn’t put my finger on why Athens held me in thrall, at least not in a way I could express that others would understand, and at one point my emotions boiled over into a flash of impatience toward my mother that, though I will always regret it, is typical for someone who’s in their early 20s and feeling frustrated. I was caught, I suppose, between being in a place that represented possibility and being in the company of someone who represented the world I was trying to escape.
The year after I finished college turned out to be what we’d now call a “gap year.” It wasn’t planned that way, but that’s what happened. I didn’t have any job prospects or anything lined up. (It turned out to be a good thing, for I spent much of that time off fighting a case of depression that, now that I look back, I’m amazed I made it through with my mind intact.) But one day the phone rang. It was a professor in the history department at UGA. They were looking at applications. Was I interested in starting in January? Oh, was I ever. But I knew so much would have to happen in a big hurry. The finances would have to get squared. I’d have to find a place to live. I’d have to move a couple of mountains. I had to conclude that although I would love to, I wasn’t in a position where I was honestly prepared to do it, and I declined with regret. So, on I went, with Georgia as my primary focus and South Carolina as my safety school, with visions in my head of moving off to Athens the next August to start my new life.
Well, not so fast. In the mail one Saturday arrives a letter from Athens: thanks, but no thanks on admission for Fall. I was heartbroken. I’d just been offered a slot a few months before, and now I’m chopped liver. What gives? My mother took me to lunch, and in our booth at the Huddle House the next town over, I stewed and considered next steps. The next week, I wrote back (by postal mail – remember, this was the mid-1990s, and e-mail had yet to make it to our tiny town) and expressed my displeasure over this perceived inconsistency. Why was I okay for January but suddenly no good? In full early-20s righteous indignance, certain that I was getting the shaft (and blissfully unaware of how admission processes actually work in high-demand programs), I demanded an investigation. Which, obviously, did not turn out in my favor, as a very polite letter a few weeks later explained.
South Carolina did want me, though, and I made my peace with that. In August I moved to Columbia and started graduate work at the big university. And it’s funny how life works: you don’t get what you want, but you end up finding what you really needed. That first semester, I met people I’d never have met otherwise. I built some friendships that last to this day. I had faculty members whose example showed me how to do the job I have now (and at least one faculty member whose example showed me what to never let myself become). This was doubly so when, after a year in the graduate history program, I decided to pursue a master’s degree in journalism instead. As I quickly found out, it wasn’t as easy as changing majors as an undergraduate, and I’m still boggled by how naive I was to think it could be. Be that as it may, the folks in the J-school were kind enough to help, and the basement of the Carolina Coliseum, with its windowless offices and classrooms, became my new home. I’ve often felt those were some of the best days of my life, and some part of me will always yearn for those times. Those were days when I was with classmates with whom I seemed to click, when I had professors who really saw something in me that I had yet to see myself, and when things just felt happy. And to think: had I gotten in at UGA, I’d have never had that. (Heck, I might not have survived it.)
None of that stopped me from driving over to Athens every now and then, though. Maybe I couldn’t get in as a student, but it was a nifty day trip and I could visit favorite haunts: not only could I spend hours in the library, but I could browse at Wuxtry Records and Jackson Street Books, enjoy a sandwich at Yudy’s, visit any number of the interesting little shops along the streets, and generally indulge the latent bohemian inside me for a little while. It was all of the pleasure of living the daydream without the reality of actually living there, and it was fun. You get to know the landmarks, and you love it while you have it, and you hope it can stay that way forever – for the heart is sentimental, sometimes foolishly so.
At the turn of the century, life took me to another part of the country. I was back a year later, to take up the job I now have, but it took four more years for me to get back to the little town with the big university. AEJMC was having its regional conference in Athens, I needed to attend conferences to build up my tenure and promotion portfolio, and so it all came together. In early March of 2005 I drove into town for the first time in nearly six years. Athens had been fixed in my mind as it was the last time I saw it. But as I drove along Broad Street, things…well, they didn’t look right. Yudy’s was gone; on its exterior was now the logo of a nationwide coffee chain. So too were gone a number of the quirky little taverns and shops I remembered. Slowly, the eccentricity was giving way to the chains. At least the Holiday Inn, which was hosting the conference, was still on that weird split-level lot. I pulled in, got my room, and then hiked up the hill to a pizza joint on Broad Street. After that, I walked over to Jackson Street Books, where I happily prowled the shelves and brought back a couple of treasures, and I spent the evening reading away, happy as could be.
If being away for five years was a shock, it was far more so when I came back nine years later. Bobby had invited me over for a visit to his home, back when he lived a few miles over, and then to dinner in Athens with a friend of his, a former network correspondent who now taught at the university. So much more had changed, so much more had become streamlined and franchised. There were signs, still, of the old Athens – Wuxtry Records remained, proud and unbowed, exactly as I remembered – but the town I had known was slipping away, ever more.
Every time I’ve been back, something else has been missing. Jackson Street Books closed in the middle of the last decade, as the realities of the weird new world of commerce proved too much for an independent bookstore to overcome. The Holiday Inn that I stayed at two decades ago is now an empty lot, soon to host yet another of the gigantic construction projects taking place around town. (I’m writing this from the Holiday Inn Express a couple blocks west, which replaced it.) Tall hotels and apartment complexes now flank the uphill approach to Broad Street. The Varsity, which used to be just outside town, is closed. The university itself, as all large universities seem to these days, has expanded its footprint and huge new buildings have appeared in places I remember as sleepy blocks of town. (Although Wuxtry Records remains – bless them – and it’s become a ritual for me to buy another t-shirt when I’m in the store. I can never have enough Wuxtry t-shirts.)
I know it’s progress. I know that you can’t want a place to remain the same forever. I also know that a place rightfully belongs not to the sentiments of those who cast their hopes elsewhere, but to the people who live there now. It belongs to them, and not to the “remember when” types.
It all comes back to that line about “I’m going over there to chase some ghosts.” I think I mean it not just because I miss Yudy’s or Jackson Street Books or any of the other places that amazed and amused back then. I think I also do it because, inside, I miss the times that those places represent. I miss the optimism of the kid who loved visiting those places, and a time in my life when it seemed all things were possible. Or maybe I over-romanticize those times because, when you know how the story turns out, memory becomes a luxury. Time and sentiment can sand the rough edges off the past’s realities and uncertainties. Plus, when your present reality has its own uncertainties and scary moments, it provides a distraction. (Memory is both blessing and curse, isn’t it?)
But I have to remember, always, that what didn’t go my way three decades ago made possible all the wonders my life has now. Change one thing – no matter how insignificant you think it was – and it doesn’t play out the same. It’s possible that if UGA had let me in three decades ago, I’d be a best-selling historian or some media darling, dividing my time between my homes in various parts of the world. Or it’s just as likely that it could have gone the other way and I’d be working in a box factory somewhere. And yet I wouldn’t want to trade that coin flip for what I have now: a life that, for all its weird angles and worries and things yet to be fulfilled, still provides a lot of contentment and contains an awful lot of love. It feels the way an honestly good life should, and it all happened because things didn’t go my way.
The rest? It’s a nice place to visit, and in my reveries I often do.
But I’m not sure I would live there.
