Grover lived in a pretty straight forward two-story cape cod where one road ended into another. The house was perfectly nice, but not exceptional and neither were its neighbors. The whole development, if lifted as a whole and transported from the Valley of the Cumberland to Charlotte or Atlanta would not have been transformed so much because of the moving. Yet everyday when I picked him up or dropped him off (the authorities of the State of Tennessee having relieved him of the burden of driving for his having assumed the right to drink a bit early), there was likely to be a tour bus circling through the subdivision.
Somebody famous lived in there, although I was never quite sure who. It never occurred to me to ask because meeting another person who was or had been famous in country music did not hold the same lustre as meeting girls. Grover’s girlfriend went to school with a girl who would play a person who used to be famous in country music. That’s who I wanted to meet. I wonder if the people on the bus wondered what it would be like to live in the neighborhood with the famous person.
Sometimes, when I am at the beach or in a distant city, I wonder what it would be like to live there. Often, when people visit our city of Altamont, they decide this is where they HAVE to live. Obviously it is drum circles and brunch all the time. Occasionally there may be some hiking. There are a lot of drum circles, and several truly exceptional places to have brunch. But boys want to meet girls here, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Waiting tables in Shangri-La is still waiting tables.
In physics, there is this thing called the Principle of Mediocrity. Basically, it says that in an infinitely large, ever expanding universe, no one place is any more central than another. In other words, where ever you are, it does not get any better than this. That’s what keeps me here.