It’s 9:58 a.m. Tuesday. Downtown Waynesville. Back at the office, this week’s newspaper is being edited and proofed before it heads to the printer, onward to newsstands around the region tomorrow morning. 

It was during the third sip of my fourth beer on Monday evening at The Scotsman in downtown Waynesville when my thoughts started drifting to this essay from The New Yorker I’d read several years ago — one which I often return to, usually when the late summer warmth transitions to the early chill of an impending fall and soon-to-be-here winter. 

Tucked in the corner booth at a dive bar in Maggie Valley on Monday afternoon, I slid across the vinyl seating across from the young couple. They’d already ordered a couple drinks, mozzarella sticks and some fried grouper bites. Some Lynyrd Skynyrd song was blasting from the front bar. 

Sitting down at the old wooden kitchen table in the kitchen of my parents’ farmhouse in rural Upstate New York, all is quiet save for the sounds of the burping coffee pot on the counter and a few birds in the trees outside the nearby screen door.

With the Mason-Dixon Line in the rearview mirror, I pushed the accelerator down and proceeded to make my way up Interstate 81 North towards the Pennsylvania/New York border. 

I first got word about Steph Wilkins while sitting in the kitchen at an old flame’s parents’ house in the small, desolate Adirondack Mountain town of Tupper Lake, New York. 

Amid a brisk walk down Phillip Fulmer Way towards the Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville, Tennessee, last Tuesday evening, I found myself quite possibly the last soul with ticket in-hand to enter the venue for the Paul McCartney concert.

Last Thursday afternoon. Downtown Waynesville. Rifling through a fresh load of laundry, I was beginning to sift through my clothes to figure out just what I needed for the weekend’s impending road trip to Maryland to cover yet again another music festival. 

Standing on the sidewalk, I leaned onto the open garage door window of Sauced in downtown Waynesville. Sunday evening right before the rainstorm rolled in. An array of the younger, service industry crowd finally sitting down to congregate and enjoy a beverage on their own time. 

Although I had a press pass waiting for me at the box office of the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium in Asheville for rock legends Chicago on Sunday evening, I found myself stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Interstate 24 East just outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee.