One of my favorite Avett songs deals with the natural tendency to want to hold on tightly to something meaningful and beautiful and stow it away for onseself. Scott Avett writes about finding a flower in the middle of New York City and wanting to take it home with him. To tear it from the bricks that it lay in and save it from city strife. Instead he leaves it there, realizes his selfish desire to uproot it, sees it flourish from afar, and notes how the flower is much prettier than here with me. 

It is a lovely tune with a great banjo part and it feels more like a story than a song most times that I listen to it. He gives another example about how people want to put bluebirds in cages, but then the world can’t hear them sing. I have always loved Famous Flower of Manhattan because the story Scott is telling is my own in many ways.

While Scott finds something he holds dear and wants to keep it for himself, so too am I notorious for finding something I love deeply whether it be a band or a movie or a place and become so passionate about it that I don’t want to share it with anyone else.

Sometimes I can’t help myself and I eventually force Place Beyond the Pines or Al’s Burger Shack onto everyone I come across, but a lot of deeper, more meaningful things than a movie or a good burger I struggle with presenting and want to pluck up, like Scott’s flower, and keep. So, when the time presents itself to speak on behalf of this thing that is so dear to me, I flail. I balk. I hesitate.

This happened recently to me when I stumbled across Bob Crawford at a local church and had the hardest time expressing to him what he meant to me. How is it possible to explain the peace Don Sutton’s voice calling an Atlanta Braves game on the radio brings to me? Or the deep resonation that Wendell Berry’s The Mad Farmer Liberation Front brings to my soul? David Foster Wallace touches on this when he writes, “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

This period of my life has really engulfed me into these types of feelings. I am graduating from UNC, which is home, and my family is moving out of the house I grew up in, which is home.

There is so much there to talk about. The friendships I have made, the moments I will forever remember, the walks home from campus, the wonderful teachers, the brilliant classes, the sprints to Franklin Street, how? How? How is it remotely possible to attempt to eloquently explain what these four years have meant?

The backyard baseball, the sprinkler in the front yard, the meals in the kitchen, the laughs in the dining room, the songs in the den, the games in the computer room, the thousands of days spent with my family in that house, how? How is it remotely possible to attempt to eloquently explain what that house has meant for 19 years?

My first inkling is to keep these things to myself. To withhold emotion. To contain the sorrow. To forbid reminiscing. To pluck the famous flower. These thoughts are too meaningful, too important for me to attempt to elucidate what is bubbling beneath the surface.

But instead, as graduation comes and the move begins, I will do my best to let the flower grow. To appreciate the place UNC and 1414 Deborah Circle will always have in my heart. To allow those places to forever remind me the space they have had in my life over the years, for good and bad. To yearn for the good ol’ days and fight for what is ahead. For we must practice resurrection.