And there was evening and there was morning, the first blogpost

Whenever possible, I like to get to Sewanee the day before the conference begins. This year I managed to get to church and then left from there for the airport for my 2:30 flight, having taken the precaution of changing out of my clergy shirt and into a Vanderbilt t-shirt. I was already wearing denim, controversially, but those grey jeans are the only trousers I have that fit my—if you can believe this—30” waist. I have a lot of shopping to do. Personal training is expensive in more ways than one.

That shirt needs to be taken in more. It also needs to be straightened out. Ugh. At least my shoes are black and freshly polished.

Sewanee is about an hour-and-a-half drive from the Nashville airport. I did the first half-hour in a vigorous downpour, but then the rain lightened and eventually stopped altogether. Somewhere around mile marker 98 is when you first get the sense that you’ll be gaining a bit of altitude, but it’s not until a few miles before the Monteagle exit (134) that you ascend the Cumberland Plateau in earnest.

I checked into the Sewanee Inn at about 5:30 and found a nice charcuterie plate and a bottle of wine with two wineglasses. I’m quite sure I didn’t order that, though I’m quite sure I’ll be paying for it. It was actually rather lovely. Given how much trouble it is for me to eat, and how much food I end up wasting when I eat out, a charcuterie plate is a perfect meal for me to share with someone. I called the very dear friend with whom I was planning to spend the evening and asked if he would like to come to my room and have a light dinner with me. He did, and while he was on his way I unpacked.

Dinner was most enjoyable. We talked about music, we talked about the church, we gossiped practiced the ministry of Christian evaluation. Then we headed over to what used to be Otey Memorial Parish—it’s now St Somebody’s and St Somebody Else’s, I forget who—and my friend played some Chopin for me. We have a shared love for Chopin, and he played absolutely beautifully.

This morning I was determined to pack as much in before registration as possible. After a continental (read: overly carby) breakfast and Morning Prayer, I did all my ironing for the week and then walked out to Green’s View and hiked just a snippet of the Perimeter Trail—just 2.2 miles in all. I’ll be back for a proper hike later in the week. In the meantime, here are some pictures:

Now it’s time to get cleaned up and head for the dining hall and then to registration. I have Compline rehearsal at 2:30, rehearsal rehearsal at 4, and Compline itself at 6:30. Compline may well be livestreamed; I’ll post a link if so. (I’ll be the guy in the tippet.) Note that all these times are Central (or “real”) Time. I spent my first twenty-one years in the Central Time Zone and have retained the feeling that Eastern Time is a kind of affectation.

My hope is to post daily about the conference—and to have more interesting things to say than I have in this post! Because I’m being really careful about my sleep, I’ll post in the mornings. If there’s nothing up before 9:00 (again, Central Time), there probably won’t be a post that day. I’m trying to figure out how to put these posts in an email so that interested folks, if any, can sign up for them rather than having to check. Squarespace assures me that this is an easy thing to do, but I haven’t found it so. If anyone reading this knows how to do it, email me the instructions. I’ll be very grateful.

Addendum: I just figured it out, so if you want to subscribe to the blog via email, just find “subscribe” on my homepage, profthomaswilliams.com, and enter your name and email address.