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Lance Martin

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Posted Monday, Nov. 22, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET

Anne and I prepare homemade waffles, cheddar-cheese grits, and coffee. We divvy up the slender Sunday edition of The Daily Reflector, the newspaper of record in Greenville, N.C. Today's front page rejoices over the East Carolina University Pirates football victory over in-state rival, N.C. State. Greenville's population is roughly 56,000, and 50,048 attended yesterday's game. That's a lot of purple Pirate flags flapping from pickup trucks. We had our oysters and beer at a pharmaceutical-industry-subsidized tailgate for the county hospital's surgery residents.

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Anne and I have been enjoying this breakfast ritual for years now. Only six months ago, however, we were doing it in New Orleans. Oh cruel fate! I can barely type those words without bursting into tears. For six years we lived in New Orleans. I was a big-firm attorney and she was a medical student. But she graduated in May, and the arcane workings of the Residency Match Program sent her to Greenville, home of the Pirates. As the "trailing spouse" in residency program parlance, I had no choice but to wolf down one last po-boy and load the U-Haul. Anne is training to be a surgeon, so her residency will last six years--six years without the possibility of parole. It's my own private Shawshank Redemption.

Perhaps you've heard of Greenville, the town that channels the Old Testament. Since moving here, we have endured a tobacco-plant-wilting drought, three hurricanes, and the area's worst flooding ever. Now we have pestilence (mosquitoes) and plague (inundated hog-farm lagoons and bloated swine floating down the Tar River). It's enough to make me consider putting blood on the door posts.

Our door post, incidentally, is technically in Ayden, a railroad town of 4,000 seven miles south of Greenville. Ayden won't be changing its name to Celebration anytime soon, but its tiny historic district has better architecture and character than anything in Greenville. We live in a tin-roofed farmhouse built in 1908. We have almost an acre of land--the back 40--teeming with kudzu. Greenville residents always gasp when we say we live in Ayden, wondering out loud why we would want to live "out there" away from "The City" (read: Greenville). We just smile and concede that we can't handle the frantic pace of the Greenville Chainopolis. Or I say that I like living inside a George Booth drawing, but they never get that.

After breakfast, Anne and I drive to Greenville for Mass at St. Peter's Catholic Church--a postage stamp of Catholicism on the Free Will Baptist manila envelope. Greenville truly is the land of a thousand strip malls and superstores. Target, Wal-Mart, Big K., Lowe's. We have them all. We pass a Chili's with a queue to rival Space Mountain. Somehow it doesn't quite compare to waiting in line to eat at Galatoire's in the French Quarter.

We make a grocery trip to the Food Lion King, and I'm ecstatic to find cream soda in 40-oz. bottles. (For the rest of the day, I sip and swagger around like Ice Cube in Boyz N the Hood.) Back home, Anne reads articles about cardio-thoracic surgery. I rake leaves, walk the dogs, take a nap, do some office work, send e-mail, take a nap, read my book, steal glances at the NFL games, and cook dinner. We chat about curtains and Christmas gifts. This is Anne's first weekend off in more than a month, and nothing beats whiling away the afternoon together.