i am experimenting with a new whateveryoucallit system, hoping it will make the posts better for you. But i remain technology challenged. So i hope it works. If not, i will once again call upon my friend, the multi-media astonishingly great Walker Hicks to help.

i also have been reticent to post much of anything here lately. i could blame it on a number of things, but to be honest, i just haven’t quite felt like it. Oh, i’ve been doing some writing, but it has been it struck me to do so, not because i have had to write. 

So as i try to move forward and get my stuff in order, again and again and again as The Highwaymen once sang, i decided to post this old one.

i don’t know where i actually posted this. It was a while ago. It may have been a long lost post. It could be, and i move in this direction, a Democrat column. but i don’t know and am not really interested in finding out. i just stumbled across it tonight. It struck some chords.

i don’t know why but John Kennedy’s assassination kept coming up in my mind tonight. It was just over a month and 55 years ago. A long time. It reminded me of Nashville and Vanderbilt where, when walking back from class (yeh, i actually attended most of my classes, believe it or not) Winston Churchill’s nephew Charlie, a distinguished chap, came out of the Beta house and asked me and several others if we had heard the President had been shot. Kennedy had been shot and i gathered with the other Kappa Sigma brothers around the radio and listened until the news folks reported he was dead. Stunned. In disbelief.

And somehow, that terrible moment in time put me in tune with the below post or column or whatever it was. This was written several years ago.

So i share:

Dirt, Rain

It is always, always nostalgic for me when I visit home as I have this week (hence, no San Diego dateline).

Thursday when I drove up the hill of Castle Heights Avenue, nostalgia whacked me in the face with a flat-bladed shovel.

McFadden Auditorium was gone. Tilled brown dirt covered the lot where the old regal edifice had dominated the skyline since 1941. McFadden always comes to my mind when I hear a school sing the lines in their alma mater:

“On the city’s western border,
“Reared against the sky
“Proudly stands our Alma Mater
“As the years roll by.”

The tune I associate with alma maters came from the 1857 big hit, “Annie Lisle.” Written by H.S. Thompson of Boston, the lyrics were far from inspirational, telling of the demise of a young damsel, presumably of tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called back then. Yet the tune was picked up by scores of high schools and colleges for their alma mater.

The most familiar lyrics were originally written for Vanderbilt in 1907 by Robert H. Vaughn, but I have heard those lyrics adapted for schools across the country, including my daughter’s high school, Bonita Vista, in the Southwest corner.

But when I hear those words, I think of McFadden Auditorium reared against the sky.

No more.

On my drive, I turned down Hill Street to be face-whacked by that nostalgia shovel again. More dirt and even a few houses had taken over the old Heights drill field. Although I missed most drill periods for athletics, the freshman and junior varsity football practice fields were part of the freshly tilled dirt as well.

Thus far, the baseball diamond and football practice field have been spared from development mania, but there are large bushes occupying the former location of the visitors’ dugout, and the bushes and  on the south end of the old field have extended to where home run distance to fenceless center field now would be about 300 feet, not forever like back when the Tigers were swinging away.

Whack, whack went the nostalgia shovel.

Some of the best moments of my life were spent on that football practice field and baseball diamond long, long ago.

The next day, I drove to Vanderbilt to explore some possibilities I have had in mind for some time. The next shovel whack came when I tried to park. In my two-plus years there, cars were few and far between. A number of upper class-men had cars, but that was about it.

Thinking plentiful parking would be next to the stadium, I drove to the west end of the campus. No spaces. I finally parked in Centennial Park and walked across West End to the campus.

I believe Vanderbilt has shrunk over the last fifty years. I do not know if it’s the newer buildings, the additions and design pleasing modifications to old ones, or the trees have grown that much, but everything seems more compact than in 1962. Yep. Another whack of nostalgia.

Of course, I did not take a campus map, and recalling where to go and how to get there was complicated by faulty memory and new obstacles. I eventually succeeded and accomplished my mission, but I observed the changes in detail.

Perhaps the most obvious change was dress. The uniformity of madras shirt, khaki pants, and weejun loafers for males, and skirts and blouses for females had been replaced by another uniform approach: shorts, tee shirts, and flip flops.

Returning to my car before noon, I walked by a fraternity house just I had done 46 years and ten months ago. It was like reliving a dream. That day many years ago, a student was standing at the door of the fraternity house shouting, “Kennedy’s been shot. It’s on the news. The president’s been shot.”

Friday, the fraternity house was fenced in, undergoing refurbishment. Whack went that old nostalgia shovel one more time.

But in my meanderings through the first half of my visit, I felt the late summer rain on Thursday morning, I smelled the grass as I walked through Centennial Park and Don Fox Community Park, and I talked to people who were just as friendly and concerned as they were those years ago. There is a difference between those things here and in the Southwest corner. But there also are ca lot of things alike in both places.

Some things never change, and that is a good thing.