On My Mind

Never thought I would say it, but this morning I woke up with Georgia on my mind.

Savannah, Georgia, to be exact.A couple weekends ago, my wife and I took a trip. She works for American Airlines. We fly cheap...so, we figure we ought to fly often, if we can. She has worked there a year now, and this was our first trip on her flight benefit.It was a good start.

"Why Savannah, Gene?"

Excellent question, peanut gallery! We actually flew into Jacksonville, Florida and then drove the two plus hours to Savannah, so the question of why is even better than you thought.

The original answer was simple. Paula Deen. My wife has been watching her down home cooking program on the Food Network for years. She has wanted to go to Savannah to sample the food produced by the woman she has never met, but considers a friend.

On Friday about 2:30 pm, we found her restaurant and the line of 80-odd people already formed outside it. You see, you have to stand in line to get your name on the list for dinner. They don't begin taking names until 3:30, so we were in for a wait.

Did I mention the temperature? It was hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That's no biggie for a Texan boiled at birth and dropped in a deep fryer immediately after. But then there was the oppressive humidity. You needn't sweat, only step into the millions of micro-beads of moisture awaiting the fool who dares leave the confines of an air conditioned rental car. The heat index was 120.

It wasn't Hell. I think Hell is more arid than that, maybe. But it sure wasn't Heaven either. Thankfully, Paula Deen's fried chicken, shrimp boil, and smothered steak (all featured on the buffet, which we ate at the cost of $16.95 apiece) were. The nanner puddin' was pretty good, too. And the hoecakes...my body and soul!...those hoecakes.

No one died or even fainted in that line, though both my wife and I felt more than a little dehydrated and exhausted from the heat. So, yeah. I am glad we did it...and just as glad we don't ever have to do it again.

But that is only the beginning of the story. (Thankfully, the beginning is to be much longer than the middle or the end, right?) The real reason, we discovered, to visit Savannah isn't Paula Deen at all. It's Savannah! I had always pictured it as a quaint place, a throw-back, if you will, a tribute to Southern charm and genteel living. I was right, but didn't know the half of it.

Savannah is the ideal garden city, the place time didn't forget, but clearly cherished. No place I have been to date is more perfectly and pristinely preserved. The twenty-two garden "squares" were carefully placed throughout the heart of the ancient city and the streets form a grid, so that north-south and east-west streets intersect and enclose each of them.

Founded in 1733, Savannah is the oldest town in the last of the thirteen original colonies. She was beautifully conceived, deeply cherished, and has been faithfully preserved for going on three centuries. Statues and monuments, many of them placed in the heart of one square or the other, tell her history. There is Nathanial Greene, the heroic General of the Revolution, standing tall and proud and only a couple blocks from Paula Deen's Lady and Sons restaurant. The more central and larger figure of James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Georgia colony and of Savannah, bravely faces the south, ready to thwart any advance of the Spaniards, who occupied Florida and lusted after the Carolinas. On the west bank of the Savannah River stands the mesmerizing, larger than life Florence Martus, forever immortalized as "the Waving Girl." It is claimed that for forty-four years she never failed to wave her white cloth to every ship entering the river from the sea or departing the port to brave the often treacherous waters of the Atlantic.

Throw in the Christ Church, which once had George Washington as a Sunday morning visitor, the dozens of elegant homes, hotels, and businesses, the lovely Magnolias and all of their vegetative friends and you have a trip that will be remembered for more than tasty fried chicken.

And that's why a scratchy old vinyl Ray Charles album is playing in my head, and I've got Georgia on my mind.