PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ANNA TRAVERSE
Anna Traverse, Dr. Cynthia Marshall, John Traverse, and Tia the family German shepherd at Professor Marshall’s Rhodes College office, c. 1991.
This is about Memphis drivers, but it’s also about grace, and grief, and love.
That Memphians are bad at driving is a truth universally acknowledged, or at least universally acknowledged among Memphians. And yes, there’s data to support what we all already know. (Naturally, very few of us think that we ourselves are bad drivers. Everyone else causes the problems.)
It follows logically that we often gripe — aggrieved monkeys inside our little steel-and-glass cages, with raised hands and open mouths — at the drivers who are Doing It Wrong. I try, with varying degrees of success, to avoid such demonstrations, but not for high-minded reasons, or not solely. Sure, there’s the simple truth that no one else can hear me, unless my passenger seat is occupied (who wants to listen to that?). Certainly, the offending motorists do not register my helpful critiques of their decision-making skills — they’re in their own cars, griping at someone else, or at me.
More practically, though, I find it helpful to hold two realities in mind when trying to merge into snarled traffic, or when watching someone turn right out of the left-turn lane.
First, there is a not-at-all-insignificant chance that the person I’m waving my arms at has a gun to wave back at me. Tuesday afternoon traffic is traumatic enough already — I don’t need to be staring down the barrel of a Glock on my drive home.
Second, on closer look, the other driver could easily turn out to be someone I know, or who knows me: my third-grade teacher, a client, a colleague, a neighbor, a friend, or … you! (Hopefully sans Glock.)
And what could be more Memphis than the coexistence of those two possibilities? The person in the other car might shoot me. Or they might have taught me long division 30 years ago.
Fifteen years ago, without quite meaning to, I moved back to this perplexing, lovable, infuriating city. As such things go, I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing until months or years later. The return was, I earnestly believed, merely a temporary respite to tend to an array of troubles, medical and otherwise.
In the early years back, I remember being jarred each time I ran into someone familiar. Accustomed to the relative anonymity of bigger cities, I balked at the prospect of bumping into God-knows-who in the produce section. I would put my head down and try to avoid making eye contact with anyone, just as a precaution.
But then a funny thing began to happen: Spontaneous encounters — the sort I once tried so hard to avoid — started offering unexpected magic. As the years have gone on and I’ve lifted my head up more often, willingly locking eyes with strangers(!), moments of unexpected beauty have followed.
To say that Memphis is a small town that happens to be home to a million-ish people is about as clichéd as complaining about the way we drive our cars here. But here I am, it seems, saying both in the space of a few paragraphs.
Because as much as I once wanted to hide, now I love few things more than interactions with strangers or near-strangers who ask me, a little shyly, a question that stitches together all the scraps of my life. “Are you John Traverse’s daughter?” “Was your mom … Cynthia Marshall?” My parents are both dead now — my mother since 2005, and my father since 2020; they were 51 and 64, respectively, facts that feel even more brutal the older I become. Both were educators adored by their students, whose lives were in some cases repositioned thanks to their counsel and example. Those students have ways, it seems, of knowing who I am (see again: small town), and from time to time, work up the nerve to walk up and tell me.
Every time it happens, I feel I’ve been given the world’s most beautiful, least earned gift. One such person, Abby Wingfield, is a spring-semester intern with this magazine. Before enrolling at Rhodes College (where she has, she says, heard stories about my mother, who chaired the English department there — remarkable considering Abby was a toddler in 2005!), she studied at Houston High School, where (you guessed it) my father taught English.
In her internship interview, she mentioned the impact of her favorite teacher: one John Traverse. I have cried before when employees have given notice, but that was the first time my eyes got misty in an initial interview. A few months ago, in what I believe to be a first, someone who has since become a friend recognized me as Cynthia Marshall’s daughter — not through internet sleuthing, but for the beautifully analog reason that I look like my mom, move like she did, walk a dog who looks like one she would have chosen. There have been many, many more such moments, and each one brings me closer to center.
Moments like these don’t happen everywhere, but in Memphis, they’re barely surprising. Now if only we could remember that — how connected we are, how not-invisible, how loved — when we step behind the wheel.
