Nostalgia: Prologue

Every year my law school would hold a series of "Admitted Student Weekends" during which prospective law students could take a few tours of Charlottesville, sit in on a few classes, and generally attune themselves to the school's vibe to see if they wouldn't rather attend classes somewhere closer to civilization. My wife and I volunteered to host an admitted student from New York, and he was definitely of this mind. He was a nice enough guy and a very gracious guest, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we had tacitly agreed to reenact the story where City Mouse visits Country Mouse, with me solidly in the provincial role. We were from the same planet, but two different worlds: me--English major living with a wife and three kids in a basement apartment visited by ants and groundhogs; him--unattached marketer for Rockstar Games, paying his Manhattan rent by selling Grand Theft Auto to twelve-year-old boys. Anyway, I tried to sell him on the beauties of studying law in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but I could see in his polite disinterest that he was bound for Columbia or NYU, back home in the navel of the Western world.

Everybody has their favorite places, and as for me I would go back to Charlottesville in a heartbeat. Though we had to wash all the dishes by hand, and though a hard rain would cause the phone jacks to weep all over the old linoleum floors that covered the entire apartment, I look back on those three years with a deep longing for something unrecoverable. Charlottesville was beautiful, "fringed with joy," as Woolf once put it, and every hill and leaf seemed to be infused with the sort of glory that would make Dickinson or Hopkins apoplectic. The grass was so green, the earth was red, and everywhere you looked there were ancient, time-worn mountains, layering the horizon in shades of blue. Every morning, in the spring, I would ramble down a hill dotted with buttercups and wild chives, cross the stream where my children liked to play, walk in the shade of tall straight trees, and then amble up another hill of buttercups and violets. In any given season we could look out the back sliding door and see cardinals flashing in and out of the crabapple trees, groundhogs lumbering through the grass, or a mother skunk out for a midnight walk with her two kits--adorable as long as they stayed on the other side of the glass.

Built around a major university, Charlottesville never felt too culturally remote, and it was my privilege to associate with some of the sharpest minds I've ever known. As for the geographical remoteness, I have to say that although I sometimes grew tired of making the two hour trip to DC, I liked those nights, driving back in the deep black, when I could see every star in the sky.

In short, I've had the misfortune of finding my favorite place rather early in life, and now that I've gone elsewhere I find myself understanding for the first time what all those songs mean when they talk about moving on but leaving your heart behind.