O little town of Chapel Hill, farewell
Monday, December 16th 2002, 2301 hours
Location: Strong's Coffee
Weather: mild
In the glass: an Americano
Soundtrack: the usual Strong's mix

It was eleven-thirty last night, and the wind was blowing, and I was making my way to Rum Runners for a drink and to say I'd at least been there once. (Peter Coclanis - chair of UNC's History department, and one of the people I'll be seeing in Singapore in a few months' time - recommended it at our last lunch together, and who am I to disagree?) And just as I cross Franklin Street, I more or less walk right into Jennifer, from the Outing Club, and we embrace. Jennifer's one of my favourite people here, with a brazen try-anything-once sort of chutzpah coupled with an absolutely disarming gift for affection. I keep bumping into her, which is nice because ever since that final farewell dinner last Tuesday I haven't been expecting to see her ever again. Where are you going? I ask. And she answers, to Strong's, to meet up with Kevin, who's her boyfriend. I'm going to the pub, I tell her. I want to go, she says. I need a drink. Come along then, I say. I can't, she answers. I'm underage. Never mind that, say I, and I offer her my elbow, and off we go to the pub, pretty as you please.

Rum Runners is a members-only bar, but that's all right since I'm a member already and have, in fact, a membership card waiting for me at the door. (Don't ask how.) I sign Jennifer in breezily, and she greets the waitresses, whom she knows (and who are, incidentally, also underage, being nineteen years old). Now the gimmick of Rum Runners is something they call a dueling piano show: every night there're two grand pianos playing against each other, with the pianists also singing and taking requests from the crowd. I place a few, accompanied by a tip, of course, eventually. Jennifer goes off to tell Kevin where she is, and I sit comfortably on a stool enjoying a bottle of beer and the music. After a while Jennifer comes back, and the bar starts to get crowded: little groups of people come along, bantering with the piano players as they do. And soon the bar is wonderfully full of life, and half-shouted conversations, and the clinking of bottles as people toast each other; and above it all always the twin pianos, thundering joyously along, and the voices of many people raised in song. And whenever the pianos play a song that's an absolute classic, all conversation in the bar ceases, and we all roar the words:

Sing us a song, you're the piano man! / Sing us a song tonight; / Well we're all in the mood for a melody, / And you've got us feeling alright.

And on it goes. At first we plan on staying half an hour; we end up staying till two, as song after song makes the minutes fly by. Whoa-oh-oh sweet child of mi-ine! we yell. Some of the crowd have their bottles in the air, and other people are standing and swaying. I wish Terrence and my old drinking buddies from Singapore were here; they would have loved this.

Eventually at two in the morning one final song brings the magnificent carouse to a close. It's a song that I've requested, though at the time I hardly knew why. But as a final song, the lyrics feel strangely appropriate:

And I think it's gonna be a long long time / Till touchdown brings me round again to find / I'm not the man they think I am at home, oh no no no...

And we leave the bar, Jennifer hanging on to my arm for balance, and head off to find Kevin, who's since moved to the Undergrad to write a paper.

Anyway - coming back to the here and now - now I sit in Strong's, probably for the last time. How often those words crop up these days! It's here, still, I take comfort, solitary, in the half-empty cafe, surrounded by others who also understand what it means to need someplace to sit and be alone. We do not interrupt each other, we do not converse, and in doing so we understand each other. And here I sit, alone at a table, with a tall glass of coffee; I look around me, at the wooden floor polished smooth by dozens of feet, the rickety chairs and ancient benches, the worn, scarred sofas and the scratched paint on the walls, and I wish I could take it all with me. It is so unlike Singapore, where everything has to be bright and spanking new. This place is confident in what it is and what it does; it's simple, easy, unpretentious, it knows it doesn't have to be anything other than what it is. For me it is a sanctuary, a shelter against the night; how many times I've come here, aching, in pain, and let it take it away. And sometimes also there are friends: Sarah and Justin, or Jennifer and Kevin, and among them I find the simple, no-questions-asked acceptance that I crave. I will not forget them. All I've ever wanted has been to be left to live, unmolested, in simple quiet peace. Here I have found it, and I do not need more.

It is not just this place, this cafe; peace is the great gift Chapel Hill's given to me, among the trees and the pathways and the big, big sky. Here I have found warmth, and laughter, and the joys of being alive. I no longer need the city, with its noise and rush and suspicion and neuroses and whirling change. Here I have learned that life can really be simple, can be unpretentious, can have variety in the merely everyday. Here I have learned that there can be culture in the countryside; here I have learned that people can be kind. For someone as driven and as restless as I am, here I have found safe harbour. It is not perfect; but now, after these few months, I can't help feeling that - for this stormy soul, at least - if there is a heaven on earth, it must be very close to this.

And now at last I go, in this December season, into the night and the future and the quiet winter starlight.

O little town of Chapel Hill, farewell.