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| For our thirty-seventh anniversary, Earl asked what I wanted, and I said I wanted to go to Graceland before I got too old to climb in and out of the car. He said, "Bonnie, it's two and a half hours away. We could have gone any weekend since 1982." And he was right. But I always had a reason not to. This year I ran out of reasons. Here is our trip, day by day, from the notes I kept in my purse. |
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Thursday, August 12, 1999 We left after breakfast and drove over on the interstate. When we came over the big bridge into Memphis I made Earl turn the radio off so I could just look at the river. We found a motel down the boulevard from Graceland. There were already people everywhere with Elvis shirts and Elvis hair, from every state I could think of and a lot of other countries. A couple from England parked right next to us. They had come all that way. I felt ashamed that I had never driven two and a half hours. |
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Friday, August 13, 1999: The House You buy your ticket at the plaza across Elvis Presley Boulevard, and a little bus takes you through the gates with the music notes on them and up the drive. The house is smaller than I thought it would be, and prettier. I cried before I got in the front door, and I wasn't the only one. Inside: the long white living room with the stained-glass peacocks. The dining room. The kitchen, which looked like anybody's kitchen from the seventies, and I don't know why that got me, but it did. Downstairs, the TV room, yellow and navy, three televisions side by side, and the TCB lightning bolt right there on the wall. The pool room, where every inch of the walls and ceiling is covered in pleated cloth. And the Jungle Room, with green shag carpet on the floor AND the ceiling. Earl stood in there a long time and finally said he could see the appeal. That's high praise from Earl. The upstairs is closed. That was his private place, and I think that's right. Out back, the trophy building, with the gold records going on and on down a long hall, and his clothes, and the jumpsuits. The racquetball building. And then the Meditation Garden, where he is buried with his mother and daddy and his grandmother, with a marker for his twin brother. People had left flowers and teddy bears and letters. I had written a letter too, and I left it there, and that's all I'll say about that. |
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Saturday, August 14, 1999: Across the Street, and Sun In the morning we saw the cars (the pink Cadillac!) and his two airplanes parked across the street, the big one named for Lisa Marie and the little one called Hound Dog II. You can walk right through the Lisa Marie. It has a bedroom in it. Earl was more interested in the airplanes than the whole house put together. In the afternoon we drove downtown to Sun Studio. It's one small room. That is the whole thing. You stand where he stood in July of 1954, and where Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis stood too. Earl got quiet in there for his own reasons. The young man giving the tour was maybe twenty and he knew more than I do, and I have been at this for forty-three years. |
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Sunday, August 15, 1999: The Candlelight Vigil This is the night that is the reason for the trip. On the night before the anniversary, the fans line up along Elvis Presley Boulevard, thousands of them, and after dark the gates open, and everybody walks up the drive with a candle, past the house to the Meditation Garden, and down again. It goes on all night long. We got in line in the afternoon. We stood next to a family from Ohio, three generations of them, and a lady from Japan who had come by herself, and a man about Earl's age from Birmingham who had been every year since 1978 and told us what to expect. People sang his gospel songs in the line, softly. Nobody pushed. Nobody was rude. I have been to church services that were less reverent. It was after one in the morning by the time we came up the drive. It was very quiet. You could hear the candles, almost. When we got to the garden I said thank you, out loud, I don't know to who exactly. Earl held my hand all the way down. |
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Monday, August 16, 1999: Tupelo We slept late, and then Earl surprised me and drove us down to Tupelo, Mississippi, which is not really on the way home at all. The house he was born in is still there, two little rooms, built by his daddy. You could fit it in my living room. There's a chapel beside it now, and we sat in it for a while. Twenty-two years to the day. |
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Tuesday, August 17, 1999: Home Home by suppertime with a Graceland coffee mug, a TCB necklace, two postcards of the Jungle Room, a program from the vigil, and four rolls of film that are at the drugstore right now. Wesley says when they come back he will scan the best ones in for me at his school, so check back. If you have been putting it off like I did, go. Just go. Take somebody who loves you, even if he's a Johnny Cash man. |