This is not getting any easier. The deal is that for the past couple of days, these blog entries are not coming from notes such as the extensive highly detailed notes that accompanied the first week of our road trip. Instead, I’m trying to pull details from a journey we made 15 years ago. At times Caroline lends a hand as her superior memory, while not infallible, is often carrying details I had long forgotten. What I can tell you about this photo is that the horse and pasture yummies are all from Tennessee, and the reason I know that is from the time stamp on the photos and that the next photo shows us crossing into another state.
Welcome to Mississippi, where we are just dipping our toe into the state to gain bragging rights to having visited the north and south of the state. Our visit was pretty brief because we had to head back up to Tennessee and into Memphis specifically.
Not knowing if we’d ever visit Memphis again, we had to take this opportunity to visit Graceland, home of Elvis Presley and his final resting place.
For my mother-in-law, this isn’t exactly her idea of a great place to visit as she never developed a fondness for kitsch, nor was she a big fan of Elvis. As for me, this is an interesting look into a kind of prison that had likely become a madhouse. While others will feel a kind of closeness to the King by being among his possessions, all I can see is a place designed with the hope of being able to escape fame. During better times, this may have been a partying refuge where Elvis could entertain and share with friends and family, but then there’s the madness, isolation, and depression that came with his drug abuse and not being able to lead a normal life due to his bizarre fame.
I’d like to imagine that Sister Rosetta Tharpe once dined here with Elvis as he said thank you for teaching him what rock ‘n’ roll was going to be. While Elvis won accolades, fame, and fortune, she will live on in rock history as the pioneer who defined the sound of the electric guitar as an essential part of a music genre that has endured for the better part of 50 years.
Funny that I’ve enjoyed walking in the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, along with my share of castles, palaces, historic homes, and not-so-famous dwellings, but the feeling here is of a kind of anguish I felt at Dachau concentration camp in Germany. I don’t mean to imply that some kind of atrocities occurred here or that Graceland and Dachau should necessarily be compared; it’s just the sense of foreboding heaviness that has me ill at ease walking through this man’s home. Was it ever his intention to allow his refuge to be a museum where even his privacy is sold to those who want just a little more of him?
Once I took the thread of finding despair here at Graceland, the self-guided tour became too oppressive. This wasn’t helped by the fact that everyone was moving around in silence as visitors were given headsets to listen to a narrative about Elvis’s life here. The feeling of isolation was probably appropriate, considering that the majority of Elvis’s time here would have to have been alone. Taking off the headset, I was still feeling awkward, except now creepiness walked with me as the zombies in the house shuffled silently about, robbing the place of chatter and laughter.
The King’s wealth let him buy a lot of things, including a kind of immortality, as he entered the history books, but he couldn’t buy happiness. I was 14 when he died a hero to many who had worshipped a man they had had fond recollections of from the late ’50s to the mid-’60s. To me, he was cool in a “black and white era” kind of way but was a tired, bloated buffoon as I was busy worshipping the throne of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. All these years later, I can’t help but feel sorry for Elvis and the majority of others who have found fame in America, the double-edged sword where money carves away privacy, leading to megalomania or deep depression.
Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas is our next stop. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to bath in. While Bathhouse Row is historically awesome and architecturally beautiful, the baths are long closed as the age of therapeutic mineral baths gave way to shock therapy. Just kidding about one replacing the other, but the fact remains that public baths have fallen out of favor, so we won’t be doing any restorative swimming this fine day.
It’s pretty here in Arkansas. I don’t know what I expected, but this is beating those expectations. Okay, I know what was on my mind, more of Deliverance and squealing pigs. It’s sad this impression of the Southern United States as being one of backward, intellectually handicapped people that have been stereotyped ad infinitum during my lifetime. The idea that a bunch of “Gomer’s” lives down here is not my creation or sole interpretation; it is an image played across America millions of times a year. Why is this? Because the majority is hostile to anything less than total conformity, and those who control cultural hegemony are quick to label those that they find to be different. To be different is to be hated, and that’s just the way it is.
Good thing trees are harmonious and carefree without time to hate on others or choose to avoid certain neighborhoods due to prejudice. Instead, they grace our landscape, shade us, help produce oxygen, house us, warm us, and only on rare occasions try to kill us. For the most part, they offer us a beautiful backdrop and a place to carve our names to demonstrate that we will forever love someone.
Flowers, on the other hand, offer no permanence to carve a message upon, though they, too, indulge us by provoking our thoughts of love and romance.
A garden gnome riding a snail? Whoa, this is the most perfect thing we will EVER buy in Arkansas and it is coming home with us. I know what you are probably thinking, “Hey, is that symbolic of you riding the snail, John?” I’ll just offer you a sly grin for my answer.
Horses in lush pastures are nothing but love and are effectively the sunset and bookend for this day in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas (pronounced Arkansaw).