"Though I will always be a visitor to Charleston, I will always remain one with a passionate belief that it is the most beautiful city in America and to walk the old section of the city at night is to step into the bloodstream of a history extravagantly lived by a people born to a fierce and unshakable advocacy of their past. To walk in the spire-proud shade of Church Street is to experience the chronicle of a mythology that is particular to this city and this city alone, a trinitarian mythology with equal parts of the sublime, the mysterious, and the grotesque."
-Pat Conroy, "The Lords of Discipline"
Though I will always be a son of the Old North State, I sometimes remind myself that I spent all of my adult life thus far in Charleston. I spent eighteen years growing up on a farm in Tobacco Road, and I spent twenty-two years in Charleston, if you don't count the year in Baghdad. Like Pat Conroy I will always be a visitor there, I never really became a Charlestonian in over two decades of living and working as an employee of the city. I was in good company though, I am not sure that I ever met more than fifty "true" Charlestonians while I was living in the city. I received my introduction to Charleston the same way Conroy did- with a screaming First Sergeant and a shaved head. I had never really experienced the steam of a Lowcountry August before those first weeks, and barracks at The Citadel were not air conditioned. It was not pleasant, even at night. How ironic it is that the dank smells of Charleston during a summer night with the tree frogs singing their million songs would bring me back to those days, without the fear and the homesickness, but with fondness and not a small desire for younger, simpler days. Maybe time has a way of smoothing out the rough edges of old memories, but time also gave me a chance to learn the Lowcountry. If you learn Charleston, you love it.
Just about every important life landmark that occurs to every young man happened to me in Charleston. My whole adult experience is there. The full spectrum of my memory, from the joy of birth and love, to the sadness and tragedy of violence and death are rooted there. When I think of happy times they are draped in Spanish moss. When I recall sadness there are live oaks and sweetgrass in the background.
Shortly after I knew that I would be leaving Charleston, my wife took Tater out to Folly Beach with a photographer to get some pictures of her before we moved. We got the pictures back a few days ago. As I looked at the pictures, one in particular stuck out. Tater was standing on the beach with the horizon broken only by the Morris Island light. That was when the gravity of the move hit me. That one picture signified a coda for the passage that began in 1986. It occurred to me that to her, Charleston will just be where she was born. I'll take her back there surely, but she'll be a visitor.
Like her Dad.
