Behind me I left a group of young friends, including some new initiates, soaking up the last days of spring in anticipation of a quiet summer and the fall semester pleasures to come: fraternity rush, parties, football, homecoming. On June 6, after dropping Sheryl off in Greenville, South Carolina, where her mother met us, I returned to the fraternity house, loaded my belongings into my bronze 1978 Oldsmobile Omega, and drove away from one of the only places where I was ever truly happy. Names of people with whom I have no contact are given in full, as are the names of the deceased. *For personal or professional reasons, a few people asked me to withhold their surnames, and I complied. There was trouble back home, but for the moment the future looked bright. Sheryl’s Uncle Bill, a pilot with his own small plane, flew us low over Fort Sumter, much to my delight. At 23, I had never been on a real vacation without my family, and I certainly had never taken a girlfriend on an out-of-town trip. The next morning, my girlfriend Sheryl Moore* and I were driving to Charleston, South Carolina to spend a few days with her aunt and uncle, who lived near the beach on the Isle of Palms. After the ceremony, I returned to my downstairs room in the Phi Kappa Tau house, at 1800 Lake Avenue, to pack. ![]() For the moment, though, I was more excited about my immediate plans. Memphis State University’s law school had accepted me for the fall term, and I had arranged to spend the summer with my parents, in Benton County, before moving there. On June 1, 1988, I graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Eliot, go back to where we started and “know the place for the first time.” At the heart of even a familiar story, there is always something more to discover, and it is worthwhile, perhaps, to examine it anew from time to time and, with T. Though I know the principal event only from others’ accounts, I endured its aftermath, and it has shadowed my life and my friends’ lives for three decades. Such are my memories of thirty years ago this week. “If only I had been there!” we tell ourselves, indulging the fantasy that we would have changed the course of events where others failed. When those we love endure tragedy in our absence, our sense of having escaped it can bring remorse and guilt. Life is complex, though, and sometimes it is the events we do not witness that overtake and overwhelm us. ![]() In its quest for the truth of the past, it privileges the experiences of the firsthand participant. Or rather we are both.” -Oscar Wilde, T he Picture of Dorian Gray ![]() “Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play.
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