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C H APTER 30 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 As Kool-Aid Is from Gin WE BOUGHT A HOUSE IN MEMPHIS IN CENTRAL GARDENS, THE VENUE OF MANY of Peter Taylor's best stories, and we moved to the Bluff City for me to begin my job as chief academic officer (dean to ordinary folks) at Southwestern at Memphis. All the way to Memphis, as we drove in two cars-----my wife and I in the lead one and the children in the other, proudly driven by seventeen-yearold Stuart- my wife wept continuously as we worked our way south, demonstrating an amazing capacity for tears. Memphis may have been a Southern city, but it wasn't Atlanta. Most important, it was several hundred miles from the City Too Busy to Hate and from her family's cabin on a beautiful lake in the northern pan of the state-the site of idyllic memories. I had done what I could to get us located in a Southern city where my wife could find a real and a challenging job in keeping with her abilities and ambition, but Memphis was not the place. The marriage lasted only about eighteen months after we arrived in Memphis and moved into the beautifully renovated old house on Pealxxly Avenue in Central Gardens. She packed her belongings, had me ship her dog, Hannah More, to her by plane, and left for Concord, Massachuserts, a long way from Atlanta. But it was where the Digital Equipment Corporation, the high-tech organization at which she fotllld suitable employment as a computer programmer, was situated. Our separation and divorce were as amicable as those ruptures can be. I wasn't interested in her financial holdings, I had none ofany consequence, and there was no contesting anything. In a few months, I moved with my daughter into a small house on the edge of Central Gardens, and my son began his studies at the college where I was dean. There were some birterness and lasting animus toward me from my second wife, admittedly and deservedly, but she has maintained a loving relationship with the children she helped raise ever since she left Memphis, the Baghdad on the Mississippi, and moved to the outskirts of the most northern of cities in the United States, Boston. '22 AS KOOL·AID IS FROM GIN 123 Life as a dean at a small college in the South was as different from teaching English at Kenyon as Kool-Aid is from gin. I discovered that the first time I sat down at a lunch table offaculty members in the school cafeteria. They immediately fell silent, looked at their plates, ate their casseroles with speed and departed one by one for other duties. I would not be able ro be one ofthem ever again, I realized, so I thought about the size ofmy salaty and the fact that there was so much dead time in the forty hours of sitting behind my desk that I had no excuse not to write every day. I did that. In the six years I was at Southwestern at Memphis, called SAM by its president tmtil he was able to change the name to Rhodes, I published my second collection ofpoetry, my first novel, and wrote two others. Indian Gil!eT was already finished after years of fiddling with it. The first one I wrote behind the desk in the dean's office was Gra1-'eyard Working, in which I took an axe to my extended family in deep East Texas, and the second was my first try at Memphis, a novel I called That's All Right, Mama: the Unauthorized Life af Elvis's Twin. All three of the novels served therapeutic ends for me, as all literary efforts do for every writer. But each ministered to its own separate and specific wound. At the time, I was learning to deal with a real 00ss forthe first time in many years---having been a college teacher since 1966 and thus, like all academics, in my own mind beholden to no man-I fell in love with a woman for the first time. She was from Alabama, she was beautiful, witty, intelligent, kind, and she loved me. She was Pat, and deserves a separate book, one apart from this one in total thrall and service to me alone. From the first, we were together, and are, and will be. She makes me understand why Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, and she cannot be captured...

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