My Family Moved to Nashville for Nashville

The email was a lark—hardly even a serious offer. My friend and former professor Lorrie Moore was moving to Nashville to teach at Vanderbilt, and she wrote me to say that they needed someone to fill in for a semester, to teach a single undergraduate creative writing workshop. I was six months pregnant, with no idea of what life would look like in the new year. The new year! I could hardly imagine the next week. I was planning my days in tiny, waddling steps.

I’d been to Tennessee exactly once before, for lunch. Our still yet-to-be-born son would be four months old when we arrived. We would need to find a furnished sublet and a place for our cats to bunk while we were gone. We said yes, giving into the hopeful spirit that the universe would provide what we needed, would be our net if we jumped.

If Lorrie had moved to Des Moines, we wouldn’t have gone. Not because Des Moines isn’t beautiful—it may well be—but because we weren’t spending an hour a week watching a nighttime soap opera about it. That year, my husband and I had fallen hook, line, and honky tonk for ABC’s Nashville, the show about two country musicians and the men who love them. The show had a large cast of dreamy-looking actors who were all, to our great delight, not only credible as singers but actually totally compelling, even when you weren’t looking at them. Connie Britton, who had won our hearts as Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights, played Rayna James, a sort of Faith Hill/Trisha Yearwood/Rosanne Cash hybrid. Surely if we moved to Nashville, Connie would present herself. I imagined the sort of dinner parties where someone magically produced a guitar at dessert and everyone began to sing.

Our son was born at the end of August. My husband, ever pragmatic, took one look at the baby and said that we weren’t going to Nashville unless we found a house swap, that it was too complicated otherwise. I sent an email out to a few friends with contacts in town and crossed my fingers. It didn’t even take a day. Libby, an adventurous redhead and friend of a friend, wrote back after a few hours. We talked on the phone and sent house-proud photos back and forth, and it was done. Libby collected butterflies in Lucite boxes and dangerous-looking vintage fixtures. Her house was the least baby friendly place I’d ever seen, but our son was so small that it didn’t matter. We said yes to the delicate mirrors and the artfully stacked objets d’arts and prayed we were raising a slow mover.

We arrived at the beginning of January. The baby was four months old, and we explored the city in the small windows in between his three daily naps. Nashville itself looked gorgeous on television—sunset clung for hours and characters were always ambling in and out of each other’s bungalows. In reality, it was winter and bitterly cold. Each trip out of the house required maneuvering the baby into his bear suit, a tiny fleece sleeping bag with ears. It looked as though Deacon, the show’s resident troubled dreamboat, lived in East Nashville, the gentrifying neighborhood where Libby’s house was, but he seemed to live in a part where it was never winter.

We found the restaurants that were open at 7 a.m., and went to them often, stuffing our faces with biscuits and jam. We went to Story Hour at the library and got the cutesy-kiddie songs stuck in our heads even though the baby was too young to sing along. Another friend of a friend recommended her recently ex-communicated Mennonite nanny’s sister, also a recently ex-communicated Mennonite, as a part-time babysitter, and we hired her on the spot, both of us having visions of bonnets and homemade apple pie. Sometimes the babysitter would take a baby out for walks and he’d come home with a mouthful of grass. We hovered.

It seemed most likely that we’d run into the cast at night, but it took us three of the four months we were in Nashville to go out for dinner. Chip Esten, the actor who played Deacon, sang and played around town, as did Sam Palladio, a lanky Brit with a beautiful falsetto. The Stella sisters, who played Connie Britton’s daughters, sometimes popped up on the schedule for the Grand Ole Opry. I kept an eye on the listings. Chip performed at The Bluebird Café, a real songwriters’ haven on the west side of town, but they sold out too quickly, and we couldn’t get tickets. When a few of the cast members were at the Grand Ole Opry, we were back in New York. They were avoiding us, it seemed.

The baby learned to sit up. He learned to sleep through the night. Once a week, I drove to campus, taught my class, and sat in someone else’s office and read my students’ stories. I made a few friends at the local bookstore, but mostly it was the three of us, together all the time, making our way across the city in two-hour bursts. We could have written a guidebook to the changing tables in public restrooms. We knew the people who worked at the grocery stores. Connie Britton was nowhere to be found, though Lorrie once swore that she’d seen her wearing a wig and exiting the Whole Foods parking lot in a purple convertible. It occurred to me that the television program we loved so much was actually a work of fiction, and that the actors might not exist outside the magical glowing screen.

The news came from a friend—the cast was performing a concert at the Ryman, the “Mother Church of Country Music,” and through a bit of begging and finagling, I had a ticket. We put the baby to bed and then I ran out the door, waving goodbye to my jealous husband. The mother church had transformed into a television set—black cables crisscrossing the aisles and cameras on miniature zip lines overhead. A local radio DJ and actor was emceeing the evening, and despite his gray hair, I recognized him from his role in MTV’s mock boy band, 2tegther. He’d moved to town for a girl, it seemed, and stayed.