After I inserted the photo of Leo Tolstoy in my last post, I kept being struck by how familiar he looks to me. I finally realized that it wasn't that I was so familiar with Tolstoy himself, it was that I see his face around Knoxville and every time I travel up into the nearby mountains of East Tennessee. He could easily have passed for one of our mountain denizens, until he opened his mouth, at which point he would have been met by suspicious looks and the inevitable question, "You ain't from around here, is you, boy?"
If he had felt too alienated by always being asked that question, he could have left the hills of East Tennessee for a lucrative career playing bass for ZZ Top.
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