PHRED: G’day and welcome back. I’m Phred.
MAXINE: And I’m Maxine.
PHRED: Abingdon, Virginia — small Appalachian town, and the place Harry calls home for a long stretch.
PHRED: We’re the two halves of this thing, whatever we’re calling it this week.
MAXINE: We still haven’t settled that, have we.
PHRED: I’m workshopping. I’ve got one on the back burner — “The Daily Baya.” Sounds like a newspaper, doesn’t it? Very dignified.
MAXINE: That sounds like a vitamin supplement.
PHRED: Fair point. So — where are we? We’ve been reading Harry’s memoir more or less in order, and we just came out of Chapter Eighteen a couple of days back, which was Harry in Virginia from 2004 to 2020. His retirement years.
MAXINE: That’s right. And I remember saying then that the piece felt like a man learning to belong to a place he had chosen. But I kept wondering — why Abingdon? Why that town of eight thousand people in southwest Virginia?
PHRED: Well, today’s piece answers that. Chapter Seventeen, written back in May 2020. Harry calls it “Abingdon, Virginia,” and he opens with this line: “Though most of the named sections of my memories are from a much smaller span of years, this ‘Abingdon’ chapter covers the sixty-five years from my childhood up until 2004 when I moved to Abingdon.”
MAXINE: Sixty-five years. It’s not a chapter in the normal sense. It’s a scrapbook. Braided, unchronological, held together by nothing except that the same town keeps surfacing.
PHRED: It starts with the war. Harry’s father off in the Pacific, mother moving back to her family in Abingdon. Harry’s maybe five or six. Living at a house called Carpet Hill.
MAXINE: And what he chooses to remember from that age is striking. Not the broad historical arc. The bull in Irvin Wells’s pasture. Toast with butter, sugar, and cinnamon at Irvin’s house. The swimming pool across from the hospital. And then — this is the part that stopped me — he writes about watching chickens killed in the side yard. Heads chopped off, running around headless. Or killed by breaking their necks, swinging them around by the head.
PHRED: Yeah. And he says — this is Harry’s own words — “I mention these things because they were parts of what I assumed was a normal childhood. I don’t think many people younger than me went through those experiences.”
MAXINE: There’s no self-pity in it. Just observation. He watched violence, it upset him, nobody comforted him, and he normalized it. That’s a lot of information about how Harry became Harry in about three sentences.
PHRED: It also makes the Aunt Annie scene land harder. When he’s five or six, his mother takes him to visit this great aunt. He’s dressed up. It’s a big deal. He stands in front of her and sings “Old Dan Tucker.”
MAXINE: And he still sings it. In his eighties, Harry Baya still sings “Old Dan Tucker” when he gets the chance. I find that genuinely moving.
PHRED: [BED: DULCIMER]
MAXINE: Phred, what instrument is that?
PHRED: Mountain dulcimer. Seemed right for Old Dan Tucker.
MAXINE: It is not unwelcome, actually. But keep it low.
PHRED: Will do.
[BED: END]
MAXINE: The thing that struck me about the Aunt Annie scene was the afterward. Aunt Annie asks if his “old man” is a funny old man, tying the song to Harry’s absent father. Harry stutters through an answer, then worries she was making fun of his father. And then he writes — this is important — “This is an interesting experience to me because later in life, after I got to college, music and singing began to play a big part in my life. It still does. This was the earliest memory I have of anything to do with music and I did very little singing for the next 14 or so years.”
PHRED: That connects right back to the Caracas Reunion Song, doesn’t it? Harry at seventy-nine, singing his heart out about his Venezuelan schooldays. The same man who was too frightened to sing in front of Aunt Annie at six.
MAXINE: Exactly. The musical thread runs from Abingdon to Caracas to wherever he is now, picking up instruments and courage along the way.
PHRED: There’s another thread I want to pull. The father’s return. December 1945. Harry’s woken up, brought downstairs, introduced to a man he doesn’t recognize. And he writes — let me get this right — “I did not recognize him at all and was kind of frightened.”
MAXINE: And then this blade his father brought back from Japan. A Japanese officer’s sword. Harry kept it for decades.
PHRED: Imagine being six, meeting your father for the first time, and the keepsake of the meeting is a sword.
MAXINE: It’s not played for drama. Harry just mentions it. That’s his style — the extraordinary rendered ordinary.
PHRED: The bonfire at Red Rock is the opposite. Ordinary rendered extraordinary. Cousin Katie Booker’s boys camp. The counselors tell a story about an Indian chief calling on the fire spirit. And then — Harry’s words again — “To my utter amazement a great ball of fire came whishing out of the dark from high in the air and went directly into the center of the pile of wood and set off a huge flame.”
MAXINE: The trick, of course, is kerosene-soaked rags sliding down a wire from a tree. But Harry was six and gullible. He writes, “I’ve always been somewhat gullible, but at 6 or so it was bad.”
PHRED: He loves that he was fooled. “It worked perfectly and blew my little six year old mind. It’s a great memory.”
MAXINE: There’s such warmth in that. He could have written it as adults taking advantage of a child. Instead he remembers the wonder. He enjoys his own gullibility.
PHRED: Maxine, before we move on — I need a word that means easily duped, comes from the Latin “gullibilis,” and sort of rhymes with “visible.”
MAXINE: Gullible?
PHRED: [SFX: HORN] THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! “Gullible!” You are a champion rhymer.
MAXINE: I am not a champion rhymer. That was barely a rhyme. And you set that up the moment Harry wrote the word.
PHRED: Gullible comes from the Latin “gullibilis,” meaning easily duped. Wombats, by the way, are not gullible. Suspicious animals. Very skeptical about new holes. Which is wise, because a bad burrow is a death sentence.
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Right, sorry. Where were we? The bonfire. Back to Harry — “they got me good that night.”
MAXINE: Precisely. He celebrates being the mark. Not everyone can do that.
PHRED: The counterweight to that is what comes after. To put the fire out, the boys all urinate on it. Harry tells Cousin Katie. People get in trouble. And he writes, “I realized I had become a little snitch and I felt pretty bad about that, but it was still a great evening for me.”
MAXINE: Both things true at once. He betrayed the boys’ confidence, he felt bad, and it was still great. Harry’s moral complexity in miniature.
PHRED: Can I pause us on one more before we get to the summer of 1957?
MAXINE: Briefly.
PHRED: The telephone operator. When Harry would visit Aunt Kathleen’s house as a child, he’d pick up the phone on the party line to call Irvin. And sometimes the operator would answer — “Is that little Harry? Hi honey. Who would you like to call?”
MAXINE: That detail is almost unbearably tender. A town small enough that the telephone operator knows your voice.
PHRED: I know. I keep thinking about that woman. She probably knew everyone’s voice. She was the switchboard of the whole town’s intimacy.
MAXINE: That’s lovely, Phred. Now — the summer of 1957. Because this is where the chapter shifts from childhood memory to something closer to a coming-of-age story.
PHRED: Harry’s just graduated from high school in Caracas. He spends a few weeks in Miami, visits Tampa, takes a bus to Abingdon. He stays with Aunt Kathleen and Grandmother White. And Grandmother White — this is a detail I adore — sews nametags onto every article of clothing. Helps him pack. Drives him to the Greyhound bus when it’s time to leave for MIT.
MAXINE: “She had good common sense, more than me, and she seemed comfortable looking after me and kind of managing my life.” That’s Harry at eighteen, fresh from Venezuela, about to enter the most intense academic environment in America, and what he notices is that his grandmother is good at managing things.
PHRED: But here’s the deeper thing. Harry writes that Abingdon in 1957 was “as down home root American as you can get.” And he was not. He’d spent the last three and a half years in Caracas. His friends were from all over the world. He says — this is the crucial line — “In some ways I was never to feel that way again.”
MAXINE: “That way” being the normal American boy feeling at home with other boys. He felt it in Abingdon as a child, between 1946 and 1950. Then England, then Caracas, then MIT, then the Army, then New York — and somewhere along that path, the sense of effortless belonging got left behind.
PHRED: It’s one of the saddest lines in the whole chapter. And he doesn’t dwell on it. Just drops it and moves on to Irvin Wells driving too fast.
MAXINE: Speaking of which — the 1957 section is almost comically dense with teenage American tropes. Drive-in movies. Doo Wop records. Pool halls. Sneaking into a swimming pool in underwear. The flying garbage-can-lid UFO.
PHRED: And the 1957 Chevrolet. Harry gets the car, gets the girl — Bibi Perry —
MAXINE: We don’t know that yet.
PHRED: [SFX: DRUMROLL]
MAXINE: Phred. That did not deserve a drumroll.
PHRED: Every mention of a 1957 Chevrolet deserves a drumroll, Maxine. It’s a classic American automobile. Tail fins. Chrome. The whole thing.
MAXINE: You’re obsessed with the car.
PHRED: I’m not obsessed. I just appreciate machinery. If I’d been eighteen in 1957 with access to a Chevrolet, I’d have driven it exactly the same way. Probably faster.
MAXINE: That is not reassuring. And it is not the point. The point is that Harry takes Bibi Perry on a date, gets rejected, speeds down Valley Street at sixty miles an hour, gets pulled over, and talks his way out of a ticket by mentioning his dead grandfather was Clerk of the County Court.
PHRED: It’s such a specific little disaster. And then — the kicker — years later, after moving back to Abingdon, he’s at a dinner with old friends and mentions he once dated Bibi Perry. Turns out four or five of the men at the table had also dated Bibi. Including Rufus Morrison, who ended up married to her for a few years.
MAXINE: Harry calls her “The Snail” in quotes. Rufus’s nickname for her. There’s something almost literary about that detail — the teenage crush deflated by time and shared experience.
PHRED: The chapter winds through reunions, the White family cemetery, the Greenway Party House, Andrew Rowan Summers playing dulcimer in a walled garden. And then it ends with this passage about the Cave House, which had been sold to Robert Porterfield of the Barter Theater. Harry’s probably in college or grad school, visiting Abingdon, and he walks over to a party in the backyard.
MAXINE: He meets these young actors and actresses, summer interns from far away, delighted with their work and their new friends. And he writes, “I remember thinking that I very much envied them the experience they were having. As enthusiastic as I was about MIT, and in spite of my expectations for a rich and interesting future life, I had to wonder whether I would have been happier on their path.”
PHRED: [SFX: FANFARE]
MAXINE: What was that for.
PHRED: That was for you, Maxine. You just landed the whole chapter in one sentence.
MAXINE: I did no such thing. I was quoting Harry.
PHRED: Exactly. Harry surrounded by people who belong somewhere, wondering if he chose the wrong path. The MIT kid envying the theater kids.
MAXINE: And yet — and here’s the thing — he did end up on their path, in a way. Not as an actor. But he moved back to Abingdon in 2004. He goes to the Barter Theater still. He became the person who takes visitors to the old White family graveyard. He found his way back to the place that never stopped being his center of gravity.
PHRED: That’s the argument the chapter makes without ever stating it. Abingdon wasn’t a place Harry visited. It was a place he kept returning to until he finally stayed.
MAXINE: Before we close, I want to run our usual questions. Where does this piece sit among everything else Harry has written?
PHRED: It overlaps directly with the mother chapter — same family terrain, same aunts and cousins. With the Early Years chapter, where Tampa and Carpet Hill first appear. With the summer before MIT, which we’ve covered. And with the Virginia 2004 to 2020 chapter from just two days ago — the other bookend.
PHRED: And what surprised you?
MAXINE: The Andrew Rowan Summers passage. Harry realizing, fifteen years after meeting him, that this charming dulcimer-playing cousin was gay. And reflecting on his own homophobia being “cured” in the 1970s. That’s a level of self-examination I haven’t seen in the earlier memoir chapters.
PHRED: For me it was the telephone operator. And that line about never feeling like a normal American boy again. It reframes everything we’ve read about his rootlessness — England, Caracas, Monterey, all of it. He had a home. He lost the feeling for it. And he spent a lifetime trying to get it back.
MAXINE: What would you ask him?
PHRED: I’d ask about that line — “In some ways I was never to feel that way again.” What ways, exactly? And when did he realize it was true?
MAXINE: I’d ask about his mother saying Andrew Summers was “a little strange.” Whether she knew, whether she was protecting Harry from knowing, or whether she genuinely didn’t understand what she was seeing. It’s a small moment that opens a very large door.
PHRED: Good questions. What stays with you, Maxine?
MAXINE: The bonfire. The ball of fire whishing through the dark. A six-year-old mind being blown open by kerosene and theatre. What’s yours?
PHRED: The Greyhound bus. Grandmother White driving him there, nametags sewn into everything, sending him off to MIT with common sense and clean underwear. That’s love, Maxine. Practical, quiet, absolute love.
MAXINE: It is.
PHRED: Right. Shall we?
PHRED: Keep paying attention. That’s the whole trick. Goodbye.
PHRED: See you in the next archive.
MAXINE: If you must.
[SFX: OUTRO_OWL]
MAXINE: Was that an owl.
PHRED: Great horned owl. Abingdon’s full of them. Night time in the Appalachians.
MAXINE: We’re not in the Appalachians, Phred.
PHRED: In our hearts, Maxine. In our hearts.