My husband and I and our two dogs went to Finsterfest in Summerville, Georgia, last weekend. Finsterfest is a yearly art and music festival on the grounds of Howard Finster's Paradise Garden. Finster died in 2001, but his legacy - hundreds of thousands of pieces of religious art that he said God commanded him to create - lives on. Some of his work is still on view at Paradise Garden, much of it is owned by collectors, and some of it hangs in the Smithsonian Institution.
We've been to Paradise Garden several times over the last many years and were fortunate to meet Finster on one of those visits. We purchased a print, which he signed for us, and then he preached to us, as he did to every person who bought a print. On last weekend's trip, we bought a few pieces of folk art from other artists set up on the grounds, took a walk around the Garden and headed back home by way of Highway 27.
I love Highway 27. This is the road I drove between my offices in Fort Oglethorpe, Lafayette and Summerville over 30 years ago in my capacity as a behavioral specialist for intellectually challenged and mentally ill adults. I'd lived in the rural South before - in Tifton, Appling and Alpharetta, Georgia - but nowhere spoke to me the way Highway 27, ringed by mountains, carpeted in farmland, with its twin engines of beauty and poverty, did.
I was in my tumultuous 20s at the time, that time of life when you think you have it all together, but in fact have very little together. It was the 1980s, when I was just getting to know myself as an adult, laying the groundwork for who I would become in my 30s, 40s and beyond. I had a trio of large dogs, a two-pack-a-day smoking habit and a knack for renting disastrous houses. I was in love, but it wouldn't last. I was in recovery from an eating disorder, but not very far along. It would be years before I would marry, find work I was passionate about (writing) and a house to live in that did not threaten to kill me in a hundred large and small ways.
I think about those days as the "before" times, when I was searching for the person I would become from the rubble and reconstruction of the person I already was. I recently read an article about a 50-year-old man in Turkey who joined a search party looking for a missing man, only to realize, when someone called out his name, that they were searching for him. I feel for that guy, because I know what it's like to wander around in search of myself without realizing I'm already there.
If Highway 27 speaks to my before times, then the three decades since entering my 30s are the "after" times. What strikes me, however, is not everything I know now that I didn't know then (which is a lot), but that I'm still, on the cusp of 60, searching for the person I'll become from the components of the person I currently am. In other words, the before times and the after times are, and have always been, one and the same, blending so seamlessly into one another that it's hard to tell where old me ends and new me begins.
Which is good. Because the last thing I want to be is the last thing I was, forever and ever until I die.
When the guy in Turkey realized he was the guy the search party was looking for, he didn't slink away, embarrassed, as I might have done. Instead he confessed his identity right off. He'd been drinking, he said, and had wandered off into a forest. He apologized for the misunderstanding and asked for a light punishment. The truth was, he didn't know he was lost until he was found.
Which is the other thing driving Highway 27 always reminds me: what it was like, in the before times, to feel lost and found at the same time and how I couldn't have known that, in the after times, I would still feel some semblance of both.
Dana Shavin is an award- winning columnist and the author of a memoir, "The Body Tourist." Email her at dana@danashavin.com and see more at her website, Danashavin.com.