Following the Footsteps

I left home ten years ago in pursuit of all the grand and glorious potential an eighteen-year-old could dream up. For the last decade, I have been marching at double time, moving hither and yonder, making plans and sprinting towards them, following well-trodden paths, taking detours, getting lost entirely, and found again. This adventure has taken me from the coast of Georgia to the frosty climes of Northern Indiana, through the North Carolina Piedmont and even on a few laps around the concrete jungle of Manhattan. 

At present, I find myself in the cracked corner room of a former cotton plantation in Athens, GA, eagerly awaiting repairs with one hand on the pen. The other continually adjusting its grip on the reins of my life as the horses of Ambition, Legacy, Purpose, Talent, and Calling all fight to take the lead.  

Born and raised in Savannah, GA, I am the proud son of a long line of physicians. Despite an impressive (or impressively delayed) growth spurt at 16, I resolved that trading in the cleats for the stethoscope was the move that would allow me to achieve the life I had long admired in my father, grandfathers, and many of their friends – those genteel intellectuals with the grit to work through the night when necessary and a heart for the community.

Now, I don’t want to appear too noble in this decision because having watched Rudy a few too many times. I held on to my delusional hopes of collegiate athletic prowess for far longer than was reasonable for my frame. Nevertheless, by Christmas of my junior year in high school, I decided to enrol at Notre Dame and eventually return home to complete a century’s worth of Dr Whelans in Savannah.

I find myself in the cracked corner room of a former cotton plantation in Athens, GA, eagerly awaiting repairs with one hand on the pen.

Unforeseen Headwinds

Once I was accepted into Notre Dame, I naturally began to fill out my course register with the necessary medical school prerequisites. However, my father pointed me towards an alternate route through the College of Arts & Letters. I could complete a liberal arts major alongside the required medical school courses instead of giving my life entirely to the Sciences so soon. This was all the nudge I needed, and I quickly rounded out my schedule with a poetry seminar, the history of ancient Greece & Rome, and Psychology. 

Life was great in that first year. I was chasing down my dreams, things were new, and I was quickly ridding myself of the anonymity that comes with entering a new community. However, even while I felt like I was spinning the world on my finger, there was a growing awareness of the difference between the culture that I had come from and the backgrounds of many of my new friends, even to a point, at times, of what I felt to be a flagrant misinterpretation. While I had long heard tell of the Yankee mindset, experiencing the friction firsthand, where well-conditioned modes of behavior that I knew to be polite were confusing or even offensive to some, was a startling experience. Having hopscotched through history and literature classes in high school, I found myself in arguments where I would have a very natural emotional response without the requisite intellectual firepower to convince my opponents of their glaring errors. These discussions were mostly good fun; however, they revealed ignorance and inadequacy that irked me. 

My grandfather passed away during the first fall semester. Returning home for the funeral helped me realize what I was missing – stories. Following the funeral, everyone had a story to share. While not unexpected (my grandfather had a personality that lent itself to story), I realised how much history, culture, and the older ways of life were tied up in these narratives. This stuck with me and the hook set in the following semester during my introductory English course. We had just finished a laborious week reading Sylvia Plath and started on Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular. Reading Komunyakaa was like trading the Oxford English Dictionary for a rocking chair on the back porch. “Where’s he from?” I wondered. Flipping the book over, I found my answer – born in Louisiana and living in New York. Here was another displaced Southerner, a familiar, even familial, voice, from a land I knew well. When our professor showed us John and Alan Lomax’s prison recordings in the same class, I nearly fell out of my chair. While I didn’t grow up in the time of chain gangs, nor had I ever been to Mississippi, the strength and power of this blood-curdling black voice singing “Rosie” reached out of the speakers and grabbed hold of my soul. I stared at the motionless picture of the presentation screen, transfixed by the unmistakable sound of the land I missed dearly.

The roads diverged from there. Despite a fierce desire to continue my pre-designed track, my time and energy followed this “Displaced Southerner” complex. The components of music, literature, and even socializing all began to revolve around this dilemma. All the while, moving into Sophomore year, my Science course load only became more demanding, and the existing social apparatus seemed more constricting by the day.

A Slight Detour

While I won’t divert too much into the high and low tides of that year of struggle in this essay, it is productive for the reader to understand that this dynamic ruled my mind in those days, eventually leading to my direct study of Southern culture and storytelling academically. I chased down authors like Welty, O’Connor, Penn Warren, Faulkner, Morris, McCullers, and Porter who were able to articulately describe, in such spirited variety, the place where I was from and the lifestyle I was intimately familiar with. These pursuits eventually led to a research grant to travel around the South in my senior year, collecting elderly friends and family’s oral histories. I wanted to turn these stories into a collection of short fiction based on the tales I heard without exposing the storytellers in any journalistic sense. Behind the protective veil of fiction, I was gathering the fodder I needed from a generation that had lived through a world now mostly passed.

It was a fantastic trip; traveling from Georgia through South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, I was able to engage with stories more wonderful than I could have even dreamed. Tales of prohibition, integration, plantations, debutantes, fishing boats and football games poured out at each stop from Georgia’s Golden Isles to the Mississippi Delta. I was having such fun on this trip that while catching up with a college roommate over the phone on one of my longer drives, he said, “Well, it sounds like you’re having the trip of a lifetime.” I quickly replied, “I don’t want to have the trip of a lifetime, I want to have the lifetime of a lifetime!”

I don’t want to have the trip of a lifetime. I want to have the lifetime of a lifetime!

I returned to campus that January pouring over with energy. I had registered for a Creative Writing Course to help me put pen to paper on the stories I had collected, and through fate or Providence, my professor turned out to be from Beaufort, SC, less than fifty miles from Savannah – another local guide through uncharted waters. Through the encouragement of some of my more precocious friends, I had also worked with a professor the previous Fall to create a Directed Readings course where we drew up a bespoke syllabus entirely dedicated to Southern Literature for my final semester.

As these dots began to connect for me and opportunities seemed to fall out of the sky, this steady drift off-course seemed utterly natural and exhilarating. Alas, I could no longer escape the mutual exclusivity of my time. With only one semester left before graduation, I had to choose between a few more Science credits to complete my Pre-Professional designation or my Directed Readings. I had always had trouble with the guidance departments in my undergraduate years – noticing that they were very good at pointing the way for new Ferraris to park in prestigious garages but severely lacking in getting under the hood on a 911 with some miles on it and tuning it up. Nevertheless, when told to look into graduate programs for the following year to round out my medical school application without crippling my newfound writing opportunities over the next semester, I jumped.

Alas, I realized from all the bumps, bruises, wrong turns, and re-routes of undergrad that youth will always underestimate how much of life we have to figure out by living through it

Hidden Guideposts

That final semester passed in a flash. I read the books I wanted, worked and whittled my stories. I spent more time with the professors and friends I enjoyed while soaking up senior year’s sunshine. If I knew in 2010 what I know now, I would have spent all four years of college like this. Alas, I realized from all the bumps, bruises, wrong turns, and re-routes of undergrad that youth will always underestimate how much of life we have to figure out by living through it. If someone had told me the end of the story, I would have stubbornly tried to prove them wrong. Maybe that’s my fatal flaw, but I think there is a more pervasive point to be taken away here. Life, the journey, is the instructor. While we can learn that cliffs are dangerous or stoves are hot, sometimes we have to feel the edge crumbling under our feet or get burned to accept it truly.

Nevertheless, my dreams had not changed, only shifted, and I knew I had to return to the main highways to complete my medical school preparation. While some readers may be confused at my clinging to this ambition, the roots of duty and legacy were still deeply ingrained in my personal narrative at this point. I saw my recent excursions as necessary to complete the image of the well-read physician I hoped to become. So off I went from South Bend, IN to Athens, GA, where I would spend the following summer as a full-time writer working on a collection of short stories from my great Southern adventure before getting back in the libraries and labs of a Post-Baccalaureate program. Onward I marched. Although the drumbeat had grown faint in the distance, I could still hear the cadence, if only from memory.