"and at once I knew I wasn't magnificent
strayed above the highway aisle
jagged vacance, thick with ice
and I could see for miles, miles, miles" Holocene by Bon Iver
When I write and publish here, any given post is primarily about one thing. I may cover a lot of territory, but it's mainly about that thing. In this case, I don't know yet what I'm writing about. There are several things I want to say on several different subjects. Is it primarily about friendship, or Chattanooga history, writing, the music I'm listening to, or about science and critical thinking? I'm not sure. It may end up being about something else altogether. Ah! "altogether" is probably what it will be about. I'm going to start writing and you start reading. Maybe by the end of it we'll figure it out.
Most words have little or no meaning by themselves. They only have meaning in context with other words. A paragraph of words can have meaning, but its ultimate meaning lies in its relationship to previous paragraphs. There's another aspect to words and meaning that is even more important than that. What I mean by what I write and what the words mean to you are entirely different things. I can tell you about my father, for example, but you may not be very interested in my father, you're mostly thinking about your own father, or his father, or your Heavenly Father or Father Abraham or Father Christmas or Father Time. I have no control over any of that. I also have no responsibility in any of that. I throw the rock in the pond.. The ripples go where they will.
At this point, these words have no particular destination, Have you ever been for a "Sunday drive?" I never have. I just wondered if you had.
My brain multi-tasks. I never want to be rude, but if you and I are having a conversation, I'm simultaneously listening to you but thinking about something else. I really don't have any choice about this. I'm genuinely interested in what you're saying, But what you just said reminds me of something else (I've seen, heard, thought about,experienced that day of forty years ago). So my thoughts trail off a bit. I've learned to hide this "rudeness" fairly well, but quite often you notice. The power plant of my brain is just too handy for me not to use it. It's sitting right here on my neck even now. I can't detach it. I can't put it to the side while we talk. It is a constant challenge for me to stay engaged in any conversation. Unfortunately, quite often when you stop talking to give me a chance to respond, I really don't know what you're talking about. It can be awkward for both of us. Now if we're talking about the books of Joseph Campbell, Black Elk, having a discussion about gravitational waves, quantum theory, Leonard Bernstein's Mass, Maurice Durufle's Requiem, or the movies Ordinary People or Empire of the Sun, then I'm a little more engaged. But I can count on one hand the people in my circle of friends who want to talk about any of that. Actually, I can count them on one finger. But he moved away several years ago.
You say, "Well, why don't you quit thinking every now and then, and just listen to people?" That would be like me saying, "I want to keep my internet connection and my cable TV, but I don't need electricity." I can't stop thinking any more than you can. For you to be reading this, billions and billions of neurons are active as billions of powerful neurotransmitters are exploding in the synapses of billions upon billions of nerve cells. Your gray matter is combining information from when your mother taught you the alphabet when you were three years old, something you heard this afternoon and something you learned ten minutes ago. The only thing that keeps all this from blowing out into the air is your skull.
I am genuinely interested in your children and grandchildren. I have a son and a granddaughter who I love very much, too. But after a little while I've said and heard about all I need to say and hear. You can keep talking about the shoes you found on sale at Stride Rite or how long she played on the swing at the park because the little boy scared her on the slide and I'll keep listening, but it becomes progressively difficult for me to stay engaged. "Read any Joseph Campbell lately?"
This weekend this listening phenomenon I deal with was on full display. My wife and I had just enjoyed dinner with good friends at a restaurant on Frazier Avenue in Chattanooga. After dinner we walked to The Stone Cup Cafe to enjoy coffee and to continue our conversation. We sat down in some lounge chairs near a window looking out over the Chattanooga landscape. Actually, I was the only one sitting with a view through the window. As it turned out that was not a good idea for me if the idea was good conversation. While enjoying friendship, coffee, meaningful conversation and incredibly good music, I was looking at the Market Street Bridge through the window. The bridge, not too far away, was lit up like a Christmas tree so that pedestrians could stroll across. Caffeine, conversation, good music and an incredible view--I was officially 'under the influence."
When my wife and I moved to Rossville, Georgia from Louisville, Kentucky in the spring of 1979, we had no idea of the city's proximity to Chattanooga, Tennessee. I can get in my car and drive from our house in Ringgold, Georgia and, depending on traffic, be downtown within ten minutes. It takes me about the same amount of time to drive to downtown Ringgold. While out of town when asked where I'm from I usually say, "I live in Ringgold, Georgia just a few miles from Chattanooga." but sometimes I just say "Chattanooga" to save a few words.
In the spring of 1979 if we drove to downtown Chattanooga from Rossville after five o'clock p.m., there was nothing there but empty buildings and empty streets. There was one hotel on the far end of town from the river and one restaurant nearby. It was a ghost town. 60 Minutes, a few years earlier, had called Chattanooga, Tennessee "one of the dirtiest cities in America."
There are various accounts about what actually happened to change all that. "Urban legend" has it that Chattanooga hired a consultant from Boston and paid him several hundred thousand dollars to advise the city planners how to revitalize the city. I don't know anybody to confirm this, but it's a plausible story since The New England Aquarium in Boston has been open since 1969 and the Tennessee Aquarium was the very first downtown attraction to open.. But legend has it that the visiting consultant road around and walked around downtown Chattanooga for a day or so. At some point the city fathers asked, "So what you you think?" He looked at them and said, "You have a river running through your city."
In 1992 Chattanooga opened The Tennessee Aquarium adjacent to the Tennessee River. This aquarium receives nearly 2 million visitors a year. It is estimated that nearly 30 million people have visited the aquarium since it opened in 1992. My wife and I have had a season pass for several years. I think we have visited with our granddaughter more than a million times ourselves.
A few nights ago in the Stone Cup Cafe, while looking at the bridge through the window and trying to remain engaged with my wife and our good friends, I was thinking about that history. The Walnut Street bridge opened in 1890 to connect downtown Chattanooga to the North Shore. Most of the parts were manufactured in nearby Dalton, Georgia and were shipped to Chattanooga by rail. The bridge was closed to motor vehicles in 1978 and sat in disrepair for nearly a decade. Chattanooga made plans to tear it down, but the city didn't have the money to do so. One year after the city opened its aquarium, after extensive repairs and renovations, it was reopened as a pedestrian bridge. Since then several million people have strolled from the downtown to North Shore. Frazier Avenue and North Shore are now vital parts of the Chattanooga experience. Frazier includes quaint shops and eateries of various types. If you want to buy one of the condominiums and town homes, you'll need more than your American Express. They think very highly of them.
Beneath the Market Street Bridge beside the river is Coolidge Park. This beautiful green area has a fountain where children play in the summer and a carousel. The park is a photography venue for thousands of proms and weddings each year. It is even graced by the Chattanooga Symphony from time to time.
Then things started falling like dominoes. There came The River Walk. This pedestrian thoroughfare offers thirteen miles of paved and fenced walkway along the Tennessee River. It will be twenty three miles long when complete. It invites you to walk, jog and ride your bicycle. The annual Riverbend Festival on Ross's Landing hosts the country's top artists and hundreds of thousands of concert goers. Just buy a pin and you can come every night for two weeks. Some patrons get their money's worth with one concert. Others attend them all.
"David? David? How do you feel about that?" "I think it's great!". "No, I asked you how you would feel about getting me another cup of coffee." "Yeah, that's what I was saying. That will be just great."
In the September 2015 issue of Outside Magazine, the writers voted Chattanooga as the best place to visit and to live in America for outdoor adventures. Hiking, kayaking, biking, boating, paddle boarding, hang gliding, rock climbing, spelunking, rappelling and so much more is there within a few miles of downtown. Isn't it an irony that all of that has been here all along but it took the aquarium to bring it to life? I was in the process of Googling the magazine to get the date, when I thought, "Oh, the magazine is right on this shelf above my head." We have good bookstores, too.
The aquarium Chattanooga opened in 1992 was its fresh water aquarium called River Journey. Three years later the city opened beside it its salt water aquarium called Ocean Journey. Just beside that aquarium is an attraction that if you don't know about it, you'll walk right past it. Millions of people have walked by it while walking from the aquarium to the Market Street Bridge. This attraction is a special place that is a memorial to the official starting place of The Trail of Tears. Officially it's called The Passage. Unofficially and affectionately it's called "the water steps." Water cascades down these steps to a wading pool. Children and adults play on the steps and in the pool all through the summer months.
I'm listening now to the music I was introduced to at the Stone Cup. Since I was already "under the influence", when this song played, I guess you could say that I was "drunk". I waited too late to get Soundhound to identify it. After a few more songs I walked to the counter and asked the barista about the music. She told me that it was her own iPod playlist. Because of that she was able to quickly identify the song as Holocene by Bon Iver. As I often do, when I got home I simultaneously listened to it on Spotify and followed the lyrics while I listened. The lyrics are total nonsense. To me anyway. But they obviously meant something to the musicians because they made something remarkable out of it. After listening to this album several times. Beth/Rest has become my favorite song, but Holocene is a close second.
I live in Ringgold, Georgia, but I spend a lot of time in Chattanooga, Tennessee. If I laid my full-time and part-time jobs there end to end I would have worked in Chattanooga nearly thirty years. That's why I hesitate when asked where I'm from.
If you walk across the Walnut Street Bridge to downtown from North Shore at about any time of day or night, you can check into one of many hotels and enjoy downtown restaurants, bars and lounges, coffee shops, pizzerias, ice cream shops, movie theaters and even climbing walls. The millennials who now make up a significant percentage of Chattanooga's populations and who inhabit so many of the downtown condos and apartments do not have any perspective on all of this. These youngsters take full advantage of all the city has to offer, much more than I do, but I wouldn't think that they appreciate it like I do. They might challenge me to go rock climbing or hang gliding with them before I say who appreciates Chattanooga the most.
The 2015 revenue from tourism in Chattanooga, Tennessee was estimated to be a little over 1 billion dollars. Spelled out in numbers it looks like $1,000,000,000.00. "There's a river running through your city."
A few years ago I hired a media consultant to take a look at this blog. He said, "I like it but it needs a theme. You're all over the place. It's a nice 'slice of life' but it needs a theme. When people go to a blog they are expecting it to be about the same thing." I guess I wasted his time and my money because I didn't change anything. If I normally write "a slice of life" I guess here I'm offering two or three slices. Several years before that meeting when my gen X son helped me set it all up, he asked, "What are you going to call your blog? It needs a name." I thought for a second and said, "I want to call it 'In a Different Light' ". He said, "I like that" and he typed it in.
You take advantage of light, but do you ever really think about light? You know that light travels at about 186,000 miles per second, but there are other significant properties of light. For decades some scientists argued that light was a wave while other equally smart people argued that it was a particle. Albert Einstein and other noted physicists settled the argument that it's both. The "wave-particle" duality, it's called. . So light is "a different light" by its very nature.
Strange thing happened just after writing that. Our electricity went off. And it stayed off over eight hours. We had no lights, no cable television, no internet, nothing. You forget how much you depend on household current until you don't have any.
Try to do anything you do without thinking. It can't be done. Even when you say, "I did it without thinking" , it's not true. You were just thinking about something else.
So what is this article about? It's about time for me to go to bed. It's after midnight and I've got a full day planned tomorrow. I have a good idea where my day will start, but I have no idea where it will end up. Who knows, I may go downtown Chattanooga for a cup of coffee. I can be there in about the same amount of time it takes to brew a pot at home. And maybe I'll meet a friend and we can enjoy a casual conversation about Black Elk or the properties of light. I'd like that. But I need to sit with my back to the window.
No comments:
Post a Comment