Three years in Nashville!

I started this post on Monday but got busy. Whoops!

Sunday and Monday were sort of the conjoined twin anniversaries of our transplant to Nashville three years ago. It’s two days because we left Chicago on the morning of the 26th intending to arrive at our apartment complex, sign our lease, and get our keys that afternoon. It was a cold, miserable, wet, snowy day all through Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, though, and the roads were a total mess, so by the time we reached Kentucky, it was already nearly 4 PM. When I called our landlady to make sure she would still be there when we got there, she informed me in a tone that suggested I was crazy to think otherwise that she was headed out because it was freezing rain and she had to drive clear across town to get home.

So we bunkered down for the night in Franklin, Kentucky, without having prepared to do so. In other words, we had to unload five cats into the hotel room, set up their litterboxes, food, and water — all for one night — and dig through our moving truck to find toiletries and clothes for the night and the next day.

But we arrived safely the next morning, and all was well.

So Sunday, we had brunch at the Pineapple Room at Cheekwood to celebrate the end of our third year in Nashvegas, which means… the beginning of our senior year here! Maybe sometime soon we’ll start figuring out what we’re supposed to be doing.

Happily, we also managed to convince and to join us, and slipped in a little birthday mention for the Tube Dude.

After brunch, we wandered over to the art museum in the old Cheekwood mansion and checked out the 100 Artists See God exhibit. That was wonderful. Very thought-provoking, even for a non-believer who’s basically fed up with near-constant discussions of religion and spirituality. About a third of the pieces were clearly making some sort of statement of belief in divinity, about a third were clearly making some sort of non-belief statement, and another third were too abstract or interpretive to be on one side or the other. Pretty well balanced, I thought.

Well, after I’d gotten through the whole exhibit, I read some of the comments in the guest book, and the vast majority of them were critical, saying things like “Discussions of god should always be positive!” and “These works don’t belong in a museum — they belong in a garbage can.” I was annoyed by the reactionary and anti-intellectual nature of those comments, so I left one saying something like: “I enjoyed it! Usually I find investigations of ‘god’ boring and derivative. This was fresh and intriguing.” (I must say, I really enjoyed putting “god” in quotation marks.)

Anyway, after that, we walked around the sculpture trail, took lots of pictures of each other (here’s pics of Karsten — I didn’t ask anyone else’s permission to share photos), got cold, came back to our house, drank hot cocoa, and sat around making silly music on Karsten’s keyboard. I had a LOT of fun. 🙂