IN MY MIND I'M GONE TO CAROLINA

COLLEGE: AGE 18-21

In My Mind I'm Gone to Carolina
Age 17-18, Exeter, NH / Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1962
The poem title from a line in the James Taylor song, "Carolina In My Mind" - Taylor is from Chapel Hill, NC.
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --

Esse Quam Videri
To Be, Rather Than To Seem
Motto: State of North Carolina

During my senior year at Exeter
forces had been gathering
that would change my life
yet on the surface there was
nothing dramatic,
more like a slight shift
in the prevailing wind

the year before I had seen the film
Suddenly Last Summer
by southern writer Tennessee Williams
and it spoke to me directly
with stark poetry and ritual -
evoking feelings almost forbidden in the north

at school I was assigned the long novel
Look Homeward Angel
about North Carolina and Chapel Hill -
a book overflowing with emotion -
and I read it in a day

then on a windy winter night
I walked into town
across icy sidewalks and blue snow
to escape for an hour at a local diner -
as I approached
yellow light filled the windows
glazed with condensation

opening the door
I was hit by a hot draft
and a loud jukebox -
Ray Charles was singing Georgia on My Mind;
and for a moment I was carried back
to the south I remembered as a child -
Spanish moss on the coast and red clay in the hills
"as sweet and clear
as moonlight through the pines"

when it came time to apply to college
all of us, of course, wanted to go to
a brand-name Ivy League school
but that year, Plan B was
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

in late spring UNC
was where I was headed

on my third day at the campus
a number of wandering freshmen
invited me to sit with them
under a large oak in the Arboretum

circling and leaning up against the trunk
we must have looked like a Bruegel painting
as we passed beers one to another
around the tree
and then each took his time
telling how he
ended up in Chapel Hill

I heard stories of tobacco farms
and grandsons following in their family's footsteps
and wondered what they would think of
my quite different tale -
but they all listened and laughed and enjoyed it

and although I had never been there before
I knew I was finally home