Anything you find here, take it with a grain of salt. Much of it's true, though.
- Oak Ridge was a good place to grow up. The schools, administered by the federal government till I was an adolescent, were excellent, and the folks who laid out the town bent all the streets so that the place was a maze of shortcuts and greenbelt areas. The one at the top of our hill was called "The Jungle."
- The kids at the supermarket have heard this so often they say it along with me now: When I was coming up, it would have taken two full-grown men and a red wagon to carry fifty dollars' worth of groceries.
- Ignore anyone under the age of 26 who tells you what they want to do with their life. By the skin of my teeth I escaped the career I had planned as a physicist.
- My father worked as a shift superintendent at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant (codenamed K-25 when he started there). My mother raised me and my younger brother but probably should have been a lawyer. Daddy loved coconut frosting on a cake, but Tom favors the Italian creme. We all loved to read. Daddy's tribute to Oak Ridge doctors: "There's a lot they can't do, but there's nothing they won't try."
- Mother still lives in Oak Ridge. She has a network of old friends who check on one another. Something a lot of my generation will never know.
- My great-grandfather Williams lived in Del Rio, Tennessee, which might as well have been North Carolina. If he thought there was somebody to talk to in Newport, 15 miles down one of the scariest highways you'll never drive, he would hitchhike down the mountain and talk to them. My great-grandfather Reese was called "the Dutchman" for a reason no one knows. He ate sorghum syrup at every meal and lived to a great age. My great-grandmother Shepherd made these supremely sour apple pies and stitched a magnificent quilt as my wedding gift.
- My grandfather Shepherd passed the bar after "reading law"; his generation was one of the last that had that option. As a young attorney he worked for the Southern Railroad, and his pass carried him to Cincinnati a couple of times a year to see the Redlegs play. He served as a circuit judge for many years.
- When I meet a young person named Laura, I'm tempted to say that that was my grandmother Shepherd's name, but they never like hearing that, so I stopped.
- My grandmother Teague bore the name Eutha. My grandfather Teague, also a Ben, sold John Deere tractors and feed-and-seed in Newport.
- I don't care what the highway department says about visibility, John Deere tractors are green. Dammit.
- I got a job as a general handyperson with a country club at the end of my freshman year of college. The manager said, "Your first task will be to clean the grease trap under the restaurant." I finished and went back to him for more instructions; his eyebrows jumped and he asked, "You did it?" Turned out I was not the first kid that applied, but I was the first one that cleaned the grease trap and kept the job.
- I served one year at Davidson College, then a Presbyterian-linked school for men. They told me that all the classes I needed the next fall met at the same hour, except one: required ROTC. I took my business elsewhere. Davidson was a terrible hole. A friend of my parents' pulled a long face and intoned, "You know, you can't solve problems by running away from them." It turns out quite a lot of problems solve themselves if you leave them alone, and there's no better way to leave something alone than to be in a different state.
- I left that problem in North Carolina and went to Texas.
- Fran and I met while doing a show at Rice. One of the residential colleges put up a morality play every year, and that year it was Everyman. She played a Doctor of Philosophy and I was an Angel. Heh heh.
- In 1972, Austin, Fran was a grad student and I was looking for work. The scion of a local pharmacy chain needed a crib for a German course, and I translated a "Spiegel" story for him. First freelance assignment.
- Shortly afterward I answered an ad in the paper, translators wanted, Russian among others. I applied for German to English but made the mistake of telling them I had taken Russian as well. They gave me a Russian article on casing strings in oil wells and lent me a standard technical dictionary. Fortunately, I didn't clock myself; it's not likely I made a dime an hour on the job.
- We moved to Georgia in '77, end of summer. We had no idea there was a housing shortage in Athens and all the rental properties were off the market by June. Our home for the first few months was a duplex surrounded by soybeans and pine trees. The neighbors were distraught over Elvis' death and watched every. Single. Solitary. Television special. At maximum volume.
- We ate several months' rent and moved into town first chance. The landlord was a miserable racist whose only virtue was that he lived in Dublin.
- Georgia has many cities named for renowned places: Dublin, Bremen, Vienna, Rome, Athens of course, Valdosta (after the Val d'Aosta), Macon, lots of others.
- My bit of Georgia trivia: For each state, divide the counties into two groups, the first where the county and the county seat have related names (Tifton in Tift Co. for example) and the second where they don't (Athens in Clarke Co.). Express your result as a fraction. Georgia will rank lowest, and South Carolina highest.
- The spring pollen here is remarkable. No one warned us, living out there in the pine barrens, that we should close all the windows one particular night. Everything in the house turned yellow. (Later we found that you can still get drifts of pine pollen on that one night even if you live among hardwoods.)
- John Vance asked me to try out for Sir Toby Belch for a production of Twelfth Night he was doing.
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