Hindsight is always 20/20. When the One Foot In The Door CD starts playing, I am always overcome with regret. It’s hard to envision now, but try to put yourself in the mindset of the early 2000’s and you’re physically playing a CD. You insert the disc, and it starts to play. The first 15 to 30 seconds, fair or unfair, will shape your initial feeling about the record and whether or not you want to venture on. This is where I missed the mark. “From Danville To Blacksburg” is not a bad song. In fact, I’ve always been fond of the story it tells. It just shouldn’t have been the first track. Hindsight is 20/20.
As I wrote in the blog about the song “Old Town” from the Home EP, I was born in Danville, VA. I imagine Danville the way it was when I was growing up was like a lot of small Southern towns – bustling and booming in its small way but with an eye toward a bright future. It was a regional hub for the tobacco market which was big business for the farmers in the area and for Danville. In the heart of town was Dan River Mills along with a few other textile operations. The mill had been the lifeblood of the town for a long time. My dad and his brothers all worked there growing up, sort of a rite of passage if you will.
By the time I was in high school, it was almost all gone. The huge warehouses now sat empty, all of the ancillary economic activity associated with the auctions was gone and most of the textile mills had packed up shop and moved their operations to Mexico where the labor was cheaper. The result was a town that was now a shell of itself, that had lost its identity – and its people felt much the same. In the midst of all of that, my grandfather and my dad managed to operate a very successful flooring business that served Danville and the surrounding area – Newcomb Carpet.
When I left Danville to go to college, it was a rebirth. I love Blacksburg. The slogan is absolutely true – it is home. I never felt more safe or known or loved than I did my 4 years at Virginia Tech. My time there was transformative and life-changing. It was a place where I was free to discover myself and affirm the faith that was first born in me as a child. When I would come home from college for breaks, I worked at the carpet store as a helper on a flooring crew to earn a little money for college. I was blessed that my parents put me through school, so I worked at the store to earn money for extra things and to bide my time until I could get back to Blacksburg. I started writing “From Danville To Blacksburg” as I reflected on my home, the people and places that I loved, and my growing affection for my friends and my experiences in Blacksburg. It’s a startling shift as you begin to imagine and realize a life where your identity is not wholly derived from your immediate family and the place you were born and raised.
After my sophomore year of college, I went on a different adventure – I served as an intern at Faith Baptist Church in Sarasota, Florida. It was a great summer where I learned a lot about myself and church ministry. I mostly learned that I did not want to be a youth pastor! It was also a pivotal moment in my life as I met Gary Downing who would recruit me to the Professional Engineer Development Program with Sarasota County Public Works two years later, my first job out of college that propelled my engineering career in public works. I had never travelled that far on my own. As a parent now, I can imagine what my parents felt as they watched me drive away on a 12-hour trek to somewhere I or they had never been. It surely took a lot of faith to open their hands and arms and let me go. The second verse of the song was written in a hotel room in Georgia where I stopped to spend the night halfway on my journey south to Sarasota.
I had a crush on a girl named Rachel most of my high school years. She was 2 years behind me in school, and she was one of the most beautiful and kindest girls I ever knew. The day before I left for Sarasota, I met her for lunch to catch up. She had graduated from high school and was set to go to college at the end of the summer. I really psyched myself up for this lunch – I was finally going to tell Rachel exactly how I had felt all those years and still felt even to that day. My guess is that she probably knew or had some idea, but I decided I needed to say it out loud. In my mind, it was to serve as an ultimatum of sorts. She would have to tell me if she felt the same way at all. We had a really nice lunch. I got to hear how her senior year had gone and her plans for college. She asked me a lot about the upcoming internship and the adventure I was going on. She was always easy to talk to, and that day was no exception. After we ate, we stood outside the restaurant for a few minutes in that awkward state of conversation. There was the moment I had planned and schemed for the last several days, but I never did it. As much as it burned inside of me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t worth it, that I couldn’t endure her telling me she could not reciprocate my feelings for her. The conversation eventually dried up, we hugged, and she wished me all the best in Florida. I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen Rachel or spoken to her again since that day. As the song says, it was good to see her again, but the Lord was calling me to leave the past behind and start anew.
I decided to do a new recording of this song. Gone is the sluggish count to start the track, and I picked up the tempo slightly from the album version. I also did away with the repeat chorus at the end. Looking at it now, it doesn’t add much to the song to double that chorus there. Let me know what you think about the story and the new recording of “From Danville To Blacksburg”!
