With a steady income, I had enough in the bank to make a down payment on a place of my own: a two-bedroom bungalow in East Nashville, only a few blocks from the condo complex where the Montague Village Apartments once stood. These were the early days of gentrification. There was color and light, and grass in the yards, some respectable landscaping, wooden privacy fences replacing chain-link, people walking dogs and strollers down the trash-strewn sidewalks, waving as they passed while I sat on the porch smoking and drinking coffee in the mornings. We did not see that we weren’t integrating the neighborhood so much as we were colonizing it.

One morning, I answered a knock at the front door and found a woman in a slim black skirt and a white blouse, looking fresh despite the sweltering heat of early August.

“Hi there,” she said. “I’m Marylou Greene, and I’m running for mayor.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. You look different in person.”

“That’s what people tell me.”

She pointed at the sign in my yard.

“I see you’re supporting Archer Creigh,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“I’d like to see if I can change your mind.”

I gave her a cup of coffee and sat with her at my kitchen table and listened as she outlined her vision for the city. She had plans. A new convention center and a baseball stadium downtown. Parks rehabilitation, bike and walking paths, sidewalks in the neighborhoods. Footbridges across the Cumberland. High-speed rail. She had figures, graphs, statistics. Numbers of hotel rooms and apartments. Projected tourism dollars. Tax revenues. If Arch weren’t my best friend in the world, I think I would have gone to work for her.

“Arch Creigh is a friend,” said Marylou Greene. “But we have a fundamentally different view of where the city is heading. Arch calls it ‘the spirit of Nashville.’ I call it ‘holding on to the past.’”

“He just doesn’t want the city to buy a bunch of stuff it can’t pay for,” I said. “What if something bad happens, like a flood, or a bunch of tornadoes ripping through downtown, like a few years ago? Or what if the stock market crashes, or people stop traveling, because of an oil shortage or something? The city’s still stuck with the bill for all this stuff, right?”

“You sound just like Arch,” she said.

She looked down at my paint-spattered shoes and jeans and the stains on my fingertips.

“Oh!” she said. “You’re the painter!”

“You’ve heard of me?”

“I’ve known Jim for years. What a coincidence. Your mother was a lovely woman.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like a politician.”