Latest Posts

Source: See Rock City.com

There’s a house being built behind us. There was a house there—a perfectly good house, but someone must have decided it wasn’t good enough because they bought the property and had the house bulldozed. Now they’re building a bigger one that, unlike the old one that had reddish brick, will be completely white with black trim. It’s a trend that started about a decade ago, I think, when my wife and I were on our way to work and noticed that a house we passed on our way to work each day was being demolished. Then a new all-white, black-trim one that was at least twice as big was built in the same spot, and sat empty for at least two years. During that time I guess it attracted the attention of other house flippers, since it wasn’t attracting any buyers, and they wanted to get in on the business of not selling houses so others like it started going up.

I really don’t mind the changing look of the neighborhood, but what I do mind is that, because the house behind us is going to be so much bigger than the one that used to be on the same lot, they’re cutting down a lot of the trees that used to be between us and the previous house. What I hope they realize is that, even though we have a fence in the back, technically our property line extends fifty feet past the fence, which means some of those woods are ours. It’s none of my business if they cut down every tree on their lot. For all I care they can dig up the entire yard, cover it with cement, and paint it green. But I like the modicum of privacy that our trees offer.

They also, once, offered some protection.

One Saturday, not long after my wife and I first married, I kept hearing a strange twanging sound every time I went out into the backyard. I could hear rustling in the trees too. I couldn’t figure out what it was but it also didn’t bother me much until the afternoon when an arrow landed in the ground a few feet from me. It was a hunting arrow and had hit the ground with enough force that I was only a couple of feet from an arrow in my foot.

My wife and I decided to drive around the block to check on our neighbors who had their name nicely printed on their mailbox. And they had a SEE ROCK CITY birdhouse in their yard.

Instead of knocking we went home, looked up the last name in the phone book—this was when you could still do that—and called. A nice guy answered. I like to think he was the one who picked out the birdhouse. He said he wasn’t the one shooting arrows but he knew who was responsible, and he was very sorry, and he said he’d put a stop to it right away.

I never heard another twang after that, but I did save the arrow just in case.

I don’t know when anyone will move into the new house, and I doubt they’ll be the types to practice archery in the backyard, but when they do I might just send over a SEE ROCK CITY birdhouse. So they have a reason to keep at least one tree.

The pizza I’d come to pick up wasn’t ready so I went for a walk along White Bridge Road, which is part of an unusual neighborhood for Nashville. It’s a major thoroughfare with shopping centers and restaurants ranging from Turkish to Thai, and a sushi place where the sushi goes around tables on a conveyor belt and you grab plates of what you want as they pass by, which is almost entertaining enough to distract from the fact that the sushi isn’t that good. 

Most—but not all—of the commercial places are on the east side of the street. On the west side there are business blocks next to blocks of homes, and behind the businesses there are homes. People live within walking distance of bubble tea shops, pet food places, mattress stores, a psychic. There used to be a Chinese restaurant and tiki bar in a tall triangular building with bright red tiles on its sloping sides. It’s gone now, but it’s been replaced by apartments.

White Bridge Road is four lanes of high-speed traffic and yet because it’s so close to where people live I regularly see people, sometimes groups, crossing it, usually families with kids, or sometimes just kids. It’s not like the high density neighborhoods of New York or Chicago where bodegas and delis sit next to apartment buildings. It’s not sprawling, even if it’s  sprawlish, which makes it an okay place to walk.

It’s unusual because most of Nashville is built with cars in mind. One of the reasons we have such lousy public transportation is city planners and politicians assume everyone has a car, and, mostly, they’re right. A friend of mine has said to me several times, “I’d love to take the bus to work if I didn’t have to walk five miles across two interstates to get to the closest stop.” And that closest stop is one where, if you miss the bus, it’s a two hour wait for the next one, assuming the driver even stops. But White Bridge Road has bus benches, or at least bus signs, at almost every corner, and buses that run about every twenty minutes. For a while my wife had morning appointments at a place near it and she’d drop me off at a stop where I sat next to a guy who was a dead ringer for Robert Frost. We’d chat a bit. I learned he was a scholar of French literature, and he was impressed I could recite a bit of Baudelaire from memory.

When the bus arrived we never got a chance to sit together because so many seats were taken we’d have to split up.

I thought about all this as I ambled down the road, so lost in thought that when I remembered why I was there in the first place by the time I got back to pick up my pizza it was not only ready but cold.

Caledonian Sleeper train. Source: Wikipedia

So a guy got on an overnight train from Glasgow to London, went to bed, and woke up the next morning in Glasgow. It sounds like a joke or even like he just really overslept, which could also be a joke, and the Scottish city does, I think, have it’s own peculiar sense of humor. Craig Ferguson, doing a standup routine, once said, “Pardon me if I’m meringue, as we say in Glasgow…” He paused and there was dead silence so he added, “No one from Glasgow in the audience, then,” and went on.

It turns out train lines across Britain were shut down by extreme heat—something they’ve never had to deal with in history, which is a sobering reminder of the problems caused by climate change, and just how quickly it’s occurring. Thirty years ago when I rode the British rails regularly pretty much the only thing that could stop the trains was leaves on the tracks.

I never did ride a sleeper train, though, much as I wanted to. I did take a very long trip from Grantham, Lincolnshire, all the way to Swansea, in Wales. I asked the man at the ticket office if there was an overnight train. He just chuckled and said, “We don’t do that.” It was an odd response and I’ve always wondered if he misunderstood what I was asking. Or maybe that was just his way of telling me there weren’t enough people going from the upper northeast of Britain all the way to the lower southwest of Wales to make an overnight service necessary. An overnight train would have been nice since I arrived at my destination half an hour late, but that’s another story. In fact there are only two sleeper trains in Britain: the Caledonian Sleeper, that goes north to south from Inverness to London, and the Night Riveria, which goes west to east from London to Penzance, making it very popular with pirates.

Night Riviera route. Source: Wikipedia

Most of the time I didn’t sleep on trains. Pretty much any time I travel solo I don’t sleep much—I get too excited, but I’d been up late the night before and I also knew at least the first leg of the journey pretty well so I allowed myself to be lulled to sleep by the steady green monotony of the English countryside.

Then some time later I woke up in an unfamiliar train station—unfamiliar even though it was steely gray and had multiple lines and looked like pretty much every other major train station—and everyone was leaving. I asked the last person to go by, an older, white-haired woman, “Which station is this?” She didn’t answer me. Through the window I watched her walk to the exit then stop, turn, and go the other way. A second later she was by my seat. “Birmingham!” she said, smiling, and then she was gone before I could even thank her.

It was a small act of kindness but all these years later I still appreciate it. It occurred to me a few minutes later that, having studied the map, I knew my final destination, Swansea, was literally the end of the line. If I’d slept all the way there a conductor would have come around and told me to get out. Birmingham just happened to be a major city on the route so it wasn’t strange that it was almost everyone got off. And a few minutes later new people boarded and the train was on its way again.

Then, on my return journey, the train was stopped for a couple of hours by leaves on the tracks.