I'd sure like to meet the guy who got that quote.
Dear Friends,
I headed north on I75 out of Chattanooga around 9 am, and about a hundred miles south of Nashville I turned onto Highway 64, which meanders west across southern Tennessee toward Memphis, a distance of around 350 miles. The land is gorgeous - rolling hills of forests and farmland: a panorama of pastural America that stretched mile after mile. Below the highway farm houses, barns and the occasional steeple of a country church peacefully reside in the lush green valleys. Above the blue skies and cumulus clouds canopied the earth in surreal perfection. The corn had been harvested and the fields mowed, soybeans were next, although most acres were gearing up for a second harvest of wheat.
Looking for the almost noon latte I never found, I ventured into an off-the-highway small town. What I saw there reminded me - the human mind is a curious thing. It finds slots for forgotten experiences, real or otherwise. I don’t think we ever really forget. This time my mind exploded with the memory of the clock tower and the small town movie theater . . . and the DeLorean racing Back to the Future . . . all filmed in the most unlikely place, Winchester, Tennessee.
Driving out of town, US 64 became the Davy Crockett Parkway. Here again more memories were stirred. In 1955, when I was eight years old and living south of San Francisco, all us boys loved Davy Crockett. You HAD to have a coon-skin cap and a toy Winchester rifle. Or even a tomahawk so we could play mountain men and Indians. It didn’t matter what the real Davy Crockett looked like, to us he looked exactly like Fess Parker. This man was our hero.
Fess Parker in 1955
We were all from Tennessee, or certainly wished we were, and knew all the words to this song:
Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the land of the free.
Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree,
Killed him a bear when he was only three.
Davy, Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier.
(It goes on like that for a bunch of verses)
While in Davy Crockett country I decided to visit Lawrenceburg, where they had a statue of him in the town square and a museum. The Davy Crockettt Museum took me by surprise.
The place was a dump. Old books and arrow heads and dusty magazines and weird Indian pictures hung discombobulated on the walls. It looked as though nobody took the initiative to clean the place since 1972. Behind the counter were three very strange looking dudes and a black chick, all smoking cigarettes.
“Sign the register,” an old skinny guy with a cowboy hat said as he got up from the cloud of smoke. "You White Cherokee or Black Cherokee?" The man had a chest full of beads and feathers and all kinds of other Indian shit around his neck. His pony tail reached his waist and k o o k was tattooed on his forehead. (not really)
"Whaaat?"
"I said, are you White Cherokee or Black Cherokee?"
"I don't know."
"Well, where are you from?"
"I suppose you don't want to know . . . you want to know my linage?"
"Of course. Where you from?"
"Well, my Dad's side was Scottish, then Irish and then Pennsylvania."
"Pennsylvania Dutch?"
"No, Scottish."
"No doubt you got Cherokee blood."
"Maybe. How would you know?"
"We need to give you a DNA test. It will cost you $400."
"Ahuuum. I think I'll pass."
"If it shows you have Cherokee blood, then you're a Jew."
"Whaaaatttt?"
"The Cherokee are the Lost Tribe from Isreal. Look here. (he showed me a long computer
readout with a couple hundred names) All these people got their DNA tested and they are all Jews."
"How about that?"
"It's all recorded in this book, written in 1775 by James Adair, a Cherokee Indian historian. He's got proof, and now its showing up in peoples DNA. Probably yours too. You should read it"
"How much?"
$30."
"Ahhh. I don't think so. Thanks for sharing. Gotta go."
"Don't you want to know about your Jewish heritage?"
"I don't think so. Bye."
The more I hear stuff like this, the less I care about ancient history. Why would I care if a bunch of Israelites waved goodbye to Jesus, got in a Red Sea canoe and rowed across the Atlantic singing kumbaya all the way to their new happy hunting grounds in the Great Smoky Mountains? Right now today you're just you and I'm just me and I'm this guy who's driving down the road, minding my own business, blogging away, hoping tomorrow an old man with a cane and a white star-studded jump suit will wink at me from the shadows of his mansion and whisper "Howdy, I haven't left the building." I'm going Graceland - five minutes away from this funky motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
Follow that dream, I gotta follow that dream
Keep a-movin, move along, keep a moving
I've got to follow that dream wherever that dream may lead
I've got to follow that dream to find the love I need. Elvis Presley
Blessing and all good wishes,
David Dakan Allison
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