christy frink

(Warning: Total sap ahead. I had to get it out somewhere.)

I haven’t had a lot of time get pictures uploaded over the past few weeks, but I wanted to take a second to post this one because it’s important to me. This is Spudz, the baked potato joint I’ve been hitting up every single week for a year now. It’s over in West Nashville and kind of hidden, and I drove past it for the entire year prior before I finally ventured in. Before I tried it, I poked around the internet looking for reviews and only found a handful of stories from the Nashville Scene: One about the opening and one about the tragedy that happened a month later. A guy named Eric Brown opened the store in September 2007 and was murdered in the parking lot behind it in November 2007.

The guy who took over was an old man named Charles Johnson, who was somehow related to Eric but we never talked about it. Charles and I were pretty tight because we’d usually end up chatting for a half-hour every week while I was in there getting a potato. Charles is part of my routine, and has been, for a year. He’d simply see my car pull up and start making my potato just the way I like it. When I left, he’d say, “Now you better come back and see us soon, you hear?” And I would.

Over the course of the past week, I’ve been joking that everything else could flood, but I would seriously cry if anything happened to Spudz. I’ve been itching to get over there and check on it all week, but haven’t even had time to take a lunch break with all that’s been going on. I finally drove over that way today, pulled up into my parking spot, walked up to the front door. And it was closed. Like closed closed. The menus were all off the wall, the framed news stories and pictures of Eric were stacked on the counter, and there was an empty potato box sitting on one of the tables. It didn’t look like it flooded, but my guess is that whatever happened to his home or his family’s home was too much to handle while trying to run the business, since he was basically the only employee. Either way, I dug up a scrap piece of paper and a pen from my trunk, sat in my hatch and wrote him a note saying that I’d stopped by and saw they were closed, was going to miss the taters, and if he needed any help cleaning his home or business, my number was on the back of my card.

After leaving that wedged in the front door, I got back into my car and did what I never do: I cried. For like twenty minutes. And I completely realized the absurdity of sitting in a parking lot crying about losing my stupid potato shop when so much of Nashville has lost homes, cars, family photo albums, pets, furniture, clothes, whatever. And then I realized that it had just taken this one small loss and impact on my daily routine for the enormity of everything to finally hit. People have lost so much whether their houses flooded or not. It has changed routines. I’ve been charging full-speed ahead since Saturday afternoon and I haven’t left myself any time to process it. It’s been one of the most incredible things I’ve ever experienced in my life to see my city come together in the ways that it has. I can plow through my Nashvillest duties, I can swell with city pride every time someone says or does something amazing, I can buy my “We Are Nashville” t-shirt and dive into the rebuilding process immediately… but there comes a point when you realize how ugly this thing truly is, at its core. Loss sucks. Going without a shower for three days because my city is running out of water sucks. Seeing people’s entire lives in a pile in their front yard sucks. When half the roads are closed, traffic sucks too. The Cumberland River smells like piss, and it makes everything it touches smell like piss. Mold is gross. My list of complaints is long and I haven’t even lost anything.

Except I have. Because when a city loses this much, everyone loses. That’s part of why everyone jumps into help, I think. We all collectively gasped at the now-iconic photo of the Opry stage surrounded by water because we all recognize that it’s meaningful. But there are a ton of little things that are just as iconic and meaningful to all of us individuals. And Spudz was one of those things for me. The truth is, we all learned an incredibly hard lesson, all at the same time, that it can happen to us. Those people you hear about on the news really could be your friends, coworkers and neighbors. And there is absolutely nothing anyone could’ve done to prevent it. That sucks.

On a more positive note, I honestly can’t convey how amazed I am with the way we’ve been able to come together. There are all these cliches about this sort of thing and pulling together in times of hardship, but this is something I never could’ve pictured in a million years. People are incredible in so many ways and my mind continues to be blown approximately every three minutes.

So that’s it. That’s where I’m at. I’ll continue charging ahead and maybe this with a little bit lighter of a heart since I just unloaded on the entire internet. Exciting things to come.