July 17, 2006: Nashville

This morning our boys enjoyed playing with Trent and Ellie's girls.

After breakfast, Ellie took Shayna to camp and Adena to daycare.

While I brought a pair of front tires from Goodyear, Debbie did laundry. We met our hosts for an East Indian lunch near Vanderbilt University. They described how much Nashville has prospered over the years they've lived here.

After lunch, we toured Nashville, starting with Vanderbilt and its expanding medical center, which is in the midst of much constuction. We wound up at Centennial Park, adjacent to the campus, where the Parthenon stands, befitting a city long known as "the Athens of the South."

Built for Tennessee's 1897 Centennial Exposition, the structure serves as an art museum as well as housing a 42-foot statue of the goddess Athena, which the original Parthenon was constructed to contain and to honor. All it needs is an Acropolis and a commanding view of Athens.

The building is billed as "the world's only full-scale replica of the Parthenon," but of course it's not, since the Parthenon is now a ruin and since we have no clear idea of what the interior of the original was like. It would be much more accurate to call this a speculative reconstruction. Yet however one chooses to describe it, it's an awesome, meticulously-detailed building, and it does credit to one of the most architecturally perfect designs ever realized.

The architecture of downtown Nashville, on the other hand, is a thoroughgoing mishmash of disparate styles - neoclassical (the State Capitol), neogothic (the Customs House), art deco (the Frist Center for the Visual Arts), and modern (the Gaylord Entertainment Center).

There is an abrupt transition to the tacky, brick-fronted, country-music-themed old town, which includes the famed Ryman Auditorium.

We strolled through a reconstruction of Fort Nashborough, the first permanent European-American settlement in the Cumberland Valley.

Behind it was moored the Delta Queen, a beautiful stern-wheeler steamship. LP Field, Nashville's stadium, lies across the Cumberland River.

Also downtown is the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which currently has a special exhibit on Ray Charles, who got his start in Seattle.

Inside is a wall of gold and platinum records.

They don't call it "Music City" for nothing!

After we returned from our tour, the boys went swimming with the girls and their mothers at the Jewish Community Center. This was most refreshing, as the day's heat and humidity were brutal. While they were gone, Ellie's parents arrived. Peter and Susan, retired from their work in auto parts and libraries, moved to Nashville from New York City a couple of years ago to play the role of doting grandparents. Since they live just around the corner from Trent and Ellie, they fulfill their duties very well indeed.

For dinner, our hosts made pizza from scratch, and we sampled some of Trent's home-made porter. We discussed obesity, and he mentioned that Nashville is "the buckle on the bacon belt," a pun on its common appellation "the buckle on the Bible Belt." He told us that consuming an extra soda a day adds up to four extra pounds a year, all other factors being equal, and that an extra beer adds up to ten pounds - probably because each beer leads to at least one more. They don't call it a beer gut for nothing!

We had ice cream for dessert. (If men get a beer gut, do women get an ice cream butt?)

Oh! I almost forgot Barley the watchdog, who is an alien, as you can see by his glowing eyes.