sweet-nlow writer Colleen Cameron photographer Dylan Fagan
It’s 6 a.m. on a Saturday. My father sits quietly at the kitchen counter clutching his blue and white speckled stoneware mug. It’s been a long night. He was out until 3 a.m. He blows the steam off of his hot Lipton tea and sips it gingerly to make sure it’s cool enough to drink. He reads over the latest issue of The New Yorker through his tortoise shell bi-focals, and laughs to himself periodically as he comes across a particularly clever line or illustration. Other than those occasional outbursts, he’s pretty quiet. It’s a busy weekend for him, he’s tired, but he has been doing this for so long that he has a routine. He might go see a movie, or mow the lawn, but he has to get a nap in before he goes out tonight and does it all over again. My father has been performing with the Chicago-style blues band Slow Blind Hill as the lead singer and guitarist for just under two decades. Fitting, since he grew up just outside of the city in Libertyville, Ill. Knoxville, Tenn. isn’t a blues town the way Chicago is. Last night he played at a traditional English gastropub, an anomaly in a town filled with smoky clubs, dive bars and honky tonks. During football season the pub gets a good crowd and people enjoy the music. Yeah, it’s an English pub, but the restaurants request 26
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for British invasion artists takes inspiration from the genre that he is so familiar with. In a region of country singin’, line dancin’ and tobacco spittin’ he’ll take what he can get. He has only been up for a few hours now. He wakes up at 5 a.m. regardless of what time he goes to bed, but he is already planning his day around when he will get a chance to take a nap. My dad has always enjoyed a good nap. Perhaps it’s because he has been playing weekends in various bars and restaurants, or maybe since leaving the big city he has adapted to that slow southern mentality of which napping is just one of the South’s many side effects. He’s also thinking about what to have for dinner, another side effect of the South. Coming back to Tennessee on the weekends is like a scene from a movie or a novel or the Andy Griffith Show. For as long as I can remember we’ve been going to a restaurant called Rankin’s. It used to sit next to a dilapidated refrigerator parts store, but that has since been torn down. Now, the newly renovated 30-person restaurant stands alone on the street corner, with its six car parking lot and new vinyl siding. It opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 11 a.m., Monday through Saturday, and it really is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody. It’s the kind of place where, if you aren’t wearing overalls or