I've never been to a condo meeting but that may change. Last week I ran into a neighbor who told me that, at the last one, a man complained about the lack of parking and suggested, as a solution, that we tear up the lawns and put down more macadam. A woman found fault with the trees - we have some of the tallest and most beautiful trees in the city - because they blocked her views. Her suggestion, apparently, was that all trees next to units be cut to no higher than the first floor.
These people are of an age to have heard Joni Mitchell sing "pave paradise, put up a parking lot." Did they not catch the sarcasm?
We left Atlanta on Saturday morning, heading south toward Milledgeville. Before we entered town, we took a right off the highway at the sign for Andalusia. This was the farm where Flannery O'Connor wrote her books and raised her peacocks. On my only other visit to Milledgeville, in 1991 to write about the town's preparation for the Summer Olympics (it hosted the badminton teams), I had driven out to Andalusia but there was no sign then and the gate was locked. I contemplated climbing over the fence but didn't think the headline "Travel Writer Arrested for Trespassing" would have been good for my career. But who knows?
Now the farm is open to the public, though this Saturday things were a little hectic as preparations were underway for the bluegrass festival that afternoon. We parked in the back and, walking in, were met by a young man wearing a sea-foam colored T-shirt bearing a sketched portrait of Flannery O'Connor. We watched the short film and examined the pictures on the walls. A woman wearing the same T-shirt asked me my favorite O'Connor story. I said, rather predictably, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, but added that my favorite book of hers is The Habit of Being, the collection of her funny and stoic letters.
I asked if any peacocks were still around, and the woman told me there was a pea hen; the last peacock was killed, I think she said by a racoon. She pointed out the pecan trees; a number of the letters end with Flannery promising to send a present of pecans to friends up north. I stood a long while looking into her bedroom on the first floor and trying to imagine her typing away. Before we left I bought a T-shirt.
Downtown was as small-town lovely as I remembered it, with clothes stores and antique shops and a bakery and an ice cream parlor. We had lunch at a Greek restaurant, served by a handsome young man majoring in English at Georgia College in town. A nurse, sitting at the bar with her father, told us she worked in a neighboring town but wouldn't leave Milledgeville.
After lunch we walked to the bakery where I bought a pecan cookie.
Our hotel in Atlanta was just down the street from Manuel's Tavern.
In the mid-80s I worked for the Observer, the monthly publication of the American College of Physicians. It was an interesting but thankless job, writing feature stories about doctors who were too busy keeping up with the medical literature to read them. One day my editor told me I should fly to Atlanta and write a story about a professor at Emory medical school who was having his students read literary classics.
I called the professor, who told me the date and place of their next meeting: Manuel's Tavern. The book they would be discussing was Madame Bovary.
I flew down to Atlanta and checked into my hotel; then I took a taxi to the tavern. I remember sitting there thinking: This is what I want to do - travel the world and talk to people in bars (even if they're med students discussing Flaubert) - and wondering if I would ever get the chance to do so.
We entered Empire State South and I threw my copy of Deep South down on the bar, next to the copy of the patron sitting next to me. The author, Paul Theroux, had just spoken at the Margaret Mitchell House across the street.
Tom was a lawyer who had graduated from Emory Law School a couple of decades ago and stayed. His girlfriend, Diana, was from Columbus.
"I think it's going to be hard for me to read that book," she said.
I was surprised, as I'd gotten the impression from reviews, and from the moderator tonight, that Theroux had developed a real affection for the place, something which is never a given in his travels.
But there are subtleties about the South, she explained, that most Northerners don't get. She knew because her ex-husband had been from Massachusetts (like Theroux). She remembered the first time she visited his family, it was for Thanksgiving, and at one point she broke away from the gathering and hid in a closet to call her mother. "These people don't talk," she announced sobbing.
Robert Benchley, on his first visit to Venice, sent a telegram to friends in New York: "Streets full of water. Please advise."
So within minutes of arriving in Charleston I tweeted: "Streets NOT full of water. Please advise."
The city, I had learned even before arriving there, easily floods and rapidly empties. (Though west of our B&B, two blocks of Wentworth Street were still closed to traffic.) In fact, it looked less affected by weather than on my last visit in 1989, a few weeks after Hurricane Hugo. (I didn't mention this trip to any Charlestonians for fear that I'd be banned for life.)
It was interesting to see how different Charleston is from its Low Country twin. Both are gracious Southern cities, but while Savannah is orderly and symmetrical, Charleston is raggedy and haphazard. "Wherever the cows made a path," a Georgian friend told me, a bit condescendingly, "they put a street." King Street, the main shopping street, has a tight, winding feel compared to the wide straight line of Savannah's Broughton Street. Savannah has more trees (and bookstores); Charleston is more defined by water (the reason we were two days late).
Walking down Calhoun Street, we found Emanuel AME Church, despite being misinformed by two local twentysomethings. How could they not know the location of the sanctuary where nine people at a Bible study class were shot dead in June; where, paying his respects, President Obama sang Amazing Grace? I asked a parishioner who was leaving the church if we could have a look inside, and he said no, the church was closed. "But you're welcome to join us for Bible study at 6."
Hania and I don't look like assassins, but I was still immeasurably touched by the man's magnanimity. City full of grace. Please advise.
Reluctantly, we left the Brunswick Manor and headed north on I-95. We hit our first curtain of rain near the state line. At the South Carolina Visitors Center we learned that the roads into Beaufort were open but that the shrimp festival - the event around which this trip had been conceived - was called off.
Turning off of the Interstate, we drove across marshes and discovered that there is something moodily fitting about low-lying clouds in the Low Country. We splashed into Beaufort and pulled into the downtown Best Western, where a friendly receptionist gave us a discount.
The town looked mostly unchanged since my first visit nine years earlier, though the bookstore that displayed Pat Conroy's novels in its front window was gone. But there were two used bookstores in town, including a new one, Nevermore Books, where I had a pleasant chat with the owner and bought Reynolds Price's unfinished memoir Midstream (an appropriate title, it occurred to me, for this trip). A few doors down the dingy motel where I'd spent a night was now a fancy boutique hotel.
It was raining so hard in the evening that we drove the two blocks to Saltus River Grill. Our waitress was an older woman and the most endearing of the many gracious servers we had on the trip. "I have trouble hearing," she confessed after asking Hania to repeat her order. "And reading small print. And I work in a restaurant that's loud and dark."