I drove the farm-and-forest backroads to Athens last Saturday to pay a visit to one of my old Georgia professors. He's one of a handful of people whose fifteen-minute conversation is worth a two-hour drive. It was the Saturday before the students returned for the spring semester, and I knew that when I rounded those familiar magnolia trees, I would see the light on in his office window. (He rarely absents himself.)
I bore gifts. Even as a student in his classes, I never showed up in his office empty-handed. It would be akin to the Magi visiting Jesus with no franincense and myrrh. This time I brought in a copy of a National Geographic whose cover featured a lovely Southern woman, rose in hand, sitting on a velvet Victorian couch. The words "Faulkner's Mississippi" hung to her right. I was hoping the article might serve as a portal to the professor's past, in which both Faulkner and Mississippi are firmly intact.
We talked extensively about Willa Cather and her desert mesa. We discussed the book he was currently writing for the Audubon Society. I mentioned that I was currently reading Peter Taylor's Pulitzer prize-winning Summons to Memphis. (My professor had written Taylor's biography.) He asked me if I'd ever read Trollope, and when I answered in the negative, he pulled a book off of his own bookshelf and inscribed it for me.
As we finished talking and I was leaving, I noticed a painting above his desk. It made me think of Wyeth, although the painting looked nothing like Wyeth's work. I mentioned the Wyeth exhibit at the High Museum in Atlanta, and I told him I thought he'd enjoy it. I haven't even been myself, which is a fault in myself I aim to correct in the coming weeks. When interviewed, Wyeth was recently asked whether he would visit the exhibit, to which he replied that it would probably be too scary for him to have all of his work, all of his years, laid out before him like that.
I felt lighter as I walked into the sunshine of the Founder's Garden, where I used to go read Milton in the summer. There's a little cast iron table ( just my size) overlooking the vine-laden stone wall, a grassy courtyard where tanned students like to take off their shoes to study, and a koi pond, which on that particular day had a single pink lily floating at its surface.
It was one of those rare moments, fleeting, when I knew that I resided exactly where I should've been. And everything up to this point, everything that has happened in my life, is right.
A stone's throw from the English Department , the Founder's Garden is where I went to study for my summer-semester Milton class. This is the "lady of the garden," and behind her, the wrought iron table where I first read Paradise Lost and drank Dr. Peppers from a campus vending machine.
Every time I'm in Athens, I make it a special point to visit my former professor Hubert McAlexander, a true mentor and a one-of-kind Southern gem. It was in his class that I first read Faulkner.
The lady casts a sideways glance westward...
The ash can outside of the English Department..."Thou still unravished bride of quietude" --Faulkner 
