Moving to Tennessee

The day we moved from Rex, GA to Maryville, TN, our neighbor Debbie Gentle, made us sausage biscuits and vacuumed our house. I remember vividly the look of the carpet after it was vacuumed, the neat wedge-like shapes showing the direction in which the carpet was vacuumed. The house was empty, nothing of us was left in the house; it went from being our home to simply being an empty house. In the car, I remember thinking “Bird is going to be scared this entire trip!” Bird was Mom’s parakeet; the poor thing never got a proper name. She was a temperamental creature, only allowing Mom anywhere near her.

I know intellectually we moved to TN to start over and to get away from the crime-prone city, to move to a gentler place. I know intellectually this was the right thing for our family to do. Emotionally though, it was an event that caused me sadness for a great many years. Dreams of our life in Georgia came almost nightly. The dreams were so intense and full of yearning that when I awoke I was intensely sad knowing we were in a new life now and our old life in Georgia was behind us. All of my childhood memories were of Georgia; Georgia will always represent a kind of life that could have been. I still wonder who I would be today had we stayed. I wonder if my father and I would have become estranged. Even though my dad and I had a tumultuous relationship at best, I always hoped we would eventually rise above everything.

We moved to Tennessee when I was 13, the start of my turbulent teen years. I was an awful, mean teenager, but never towards my grandmother. At the time, as a consequence of my lack of emotional tact, I blamed my mother for everything. I saved all my angst and vitriol for my mother, which I still regret to this day. I was unappreciative, misdirected in my blame, and just awful to be around.

Looking back, I feel horrible when I view the same time period through my mother’s eyes; as an adult I can see what an awful teenager I was. Bette Midler’s song “Wind Beneath My Wing” comes to mind any time I think of my mother. Here she was making a move that was for the good of our family and I was ungrateful and spiteful. It could not have been easy, in fact it must have been much harder, for my mom to turn her back on her life and find the strength to start over again. She had a mean, verbally and emotionally abusive husband who cheated on and left her, making her have to go out into the working world that she had been absent from for a very long time. She survived the divorce and did what we all would do, and indeed what I did many years later myself when I found myself in the same circumstance – she went home.

My brother and I ended up at Walland Middle School, a backwoods middle school in the heart of Appalachia. It was a school where the poor people went. If you have ever seen the movie Deliverance, you would know what I am talking about. The irony of the situation was that we moved less than a mile from where my family began hundreds of years ago. We were moving “away” but at the same time we were coming home.

In GA, 6th grade was the last year of elementary school, but in TN it was the first year of middle school. I went from being top dog in a school with friends I had developed since kindergarten, to the bottom of the totem pole in a foreign country with very established cliques. The people spoke so differently! I could barely understand much of what they said. On the school bus, kids would get on and say “Heidi!” and I was so confused because my name was Jason. It took me weeks to realize that was the country-fried means of saying “hello”.

The kids at school immediately hated my brother and me. They called us "city folk", and they immediately felt as though we were actively trying to be superior to them. Because we came from an excellent school system into one which was very far behind, we were definitely ahead of them intellectually. This caused problems socially. We couldn’t help it that they were covering subjects that we covered a year ago. We could not help it that the mentality of Tennessee educators was focused on sports. My brother and I were not athletic. Ken was more than I, but by no means did I have the faintest interest in sports. Yet, these country bumpkins, teachers included, focused on sports to a detriment, a trait that follows most of the heterosexual men into adulthood. Our lack of interest in sports also cast a negative spotlight on us. I tried out for the basketball team, in an attempt to fit in, but as I was already a social outcast, I did not make the team.

I did however make a few friends at Walland. Whereas the guys hated and tortured me, I did well socially with girls. This was way before the idea of “gay” was even on my radar. Being the “new kid” helped me score girlfriends. I dated several girls and it felt normal and right to me, though by no means did I feel anything sexual. I became best friends with Dana Davis, who to this day I can STILL remember her phone number back in middle school! We were on the phone every night, all night. She made middle school bearable, and took up for me several times.