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Marriott is for Georgia beauticians. Carefully coiffed ladies fill the halls, lobbies, and restaurants of the hotel. They try to resemble the women in
Cosmopolitan
magazine ads, but only succeed in looking like the women in department stores who spend all day, every day, demonstrating the proper application of various cosmetics. The beauticians giggle, pat their permanents, and look at themselves in their compact mirrors. Six of them crowd into a restaurant booth made for four, and order cherry cokes.
    At 2 P.M ., Dave and I sit across from each other, both ordering the same lunch: green salad with Thousand Island dressing, steak medium with french fries, coke, chocolate sundae, and a cup of coffee. I remain seated after he leaves and overhear two college students in the next booth talking about their future. At other tables I catch bits of conversation dealing with life insurance, pregnancy, and local construction projects.
    For all the camaraderie of DeBusschere and the rest of the team, there is an overpowering feeling of loneliness on the road. I telephone friends and conduct business over long distance, hoping to connect with someone who will share my life’s experience and understand. The day passes. Local acquaintances may show up. There is chit-chat with them of times past and superficial discussions of contemporary events—his job, and my activities outside of basketball. After that exchange, it’s over. There is nothing more to say, little common interest. Sometimes I take in an art exhibit, call on a local politician, or visit an unusual section of town. There is too little time, though, and there are too many towns, each one different and exclusive, yet all part of a whole too large to know well in the time available. So I sit in a hotel room reading books, listening to the radio, and arguing with DeBusschere about whether the TV should be on—dropped into a city of which I’m not a part, unable to explore it or to know its people as much as I would like. I remain a performer traveling from city to city with only my work to sustain me.
    Some day, I say to myself, I won’t be spending 100 days a year on the road. Travel disrupts the continuities of life. Seasons of the year become merely months of basketball games. Some day I’ll wake up in the same place every morning and that will lend wholeness to my life. Flying away to play and returning one week later destroys that possibility, not because of what happened to the place, but by what has happened to me while away. When I travel constantly the experience I have seems to consist largely of observations and moments of enjoyment—the 80 degree weather in San Diego, the desert nights in Phoenix, the days in the mountain ranges of the Northwest—but never are they lived through and absorbed. I miss that sense of sharing that comes from people living together in one place, over time. I miss permanence.
    In my hotel room the day passes slowly. In the late afternoon, Country-Western singer Bill Anderson comes on the radio and sings his super-patriotic hit, “Where Have All the Heroes Gone?” He speaks for the common man. He touches the hearts of descendants from the strong Scots-Irish stock that settled the Revolutionary South and lived with the economic pressure that a slave economy generated. They rarely held slaves but they still managed to eke out a subsistence in the backwoods of the Piedmont. Their descendants proudly sent sons to Vietnam and, as Anderson sings, they can’t understand why others did not want to.
    Plantation art covers three walls of my hotel room. One scene shows four ladies dressed in highcut flowing dresses carrying bonnets and parasols; they are having tea on a columned porch with a gazebo in the background. Another picture is of a man in a waistcoat, white pants, and black boots. He is walking with a woman who picks flowers under a moss-filled oak. A third picture is of the grand hall: A Confederate officer chats with a woman who